Kirsten Hemmy, Chandrika Balasubramanian - World Englishes, Global Classrooms - The Future of English Literary and Linguistic Studies-Springer (2023)

World Englishes, Global Classrooms
Kirsten Hemmy · Chandrika Balasubramanian

Editors
World Englishes, Global

Classrooms
The Future of English Literary and Linguistic
Studies
Editors
Kirsten Hemmy Chandrika Balasubramanian
Mount Mary University Sultan Qaboos University
Milwaukee, USA Muscat, Oman
ISBN 978-981-19-4032-3 ISBN 978-981-19-4033-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0
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Foreword
New Englishes, New Questions—New Answers
Barbarism, conquests, contracts, hook n’ crook Christian theologies, and missionary

crusades were just a few of the ways the British Empire expanded beyond the compar-
atively small island that the country of England occupies. The British monarchy was
strategic and efficient at collecting the bounty of the Earth’s resources and land. By
the 1920s, 24% of the Earth’s land mass was considered the British Empire. As a
result, the English language was adopted and reshaped by each of these spaces and
more importantly by each person’s “mother tongue.” In this day and time, about 1.5
billion people speak English globally. How does infusion of politics, geographies,
and cultures impact the ways people speak English? How do these factors impact
the ways each person learns the English language?
World Englishes, Global Classrooms: The Future of English Literary and
Linguistic Studies is a comprehensive anthology and starting point for answering
these questions. This book also begins to explore new answers and how these new
answers are impacted by technologies and new philosophies. In kind, this book
serves as a catalyst for exploring how “new” Englishes give way to new questions.
World Englishes, Global Classrooms: The Future of English Literary and Linguistic
Studies is authored by 22 scholar educators. The editors Dr. Kirsten Hemmy and
Dr. Chandrika Balasubramanian bring together experts from around the globe to
explore the complexity and cultural dexterity of the English language from both a
pedagogical and linguistic theoretical perspective. The Englishes explored in this
book include Englishes from Asia, Africa, Oceana, the Western Hemisphere and
sometimes Europe.
The book offers a unique and contemporary perspective of English language and
translation studies. Considering the uses of English around the world, the book is
comprised of two sections. The first illustrates to us how to recognize the ways we
ignore the flaws in English language and translation studies. It also gives us practical
suggestions about how to teach English and translation studies in this contemporary
moment. This section of the book concludes by providing us a glimpse into the future
v
vi Foreword
of the field. The second portion of the book challenges readers how to embrace the
concept of universalism. Likewise, it encourages us to develop pedagogical practices
that encourage the wealth and diversity of Englishes in the Humanities.
Editors Hemmy and Balasubramanian have produced a manual that will guide
this important field of study into the next century. World Englishes, Global Class-
rooms: The Future of English Literary and Linguistic Studies is a truly significant
contribution to English language, translation, and twenty-first Century Studies. I am
elated that the College of Arts and Social Sciences at Sultan Qaboos University and to
the Department of English Language and Literature sponsored the 2020 conference
on Exploring Cultural Intersections. Without that important work, this necessary
anthology may have been delayed.
Dr. DaMaris B. Hill, Ph.D.

Professor of Creative Writing
English and African American Studies
University of Kentucky
Lexington, Kentucky, USA
Preface
Introduction: Envisioning the English Department

of the Future
In the early days of 2020, when many of the scholars in this volume met in Muscat,
Oman, for a conference whose purpose was Exploring Cultural Intersections in the
disciplines of Language, Linguistics, Literature and Translation, there was a distinct
feeling that something was afoot, in our lives, in the field, in the world. Some scholars
were unable to make it due to security issues in their home countries; still others were
beginning to feel the concerns of traveling while this new virus unfurled into what
would become a global pandemic. In the Sultanate, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos had
just passed away, bringing palpable uncertainty and sense of change to the country. In
the days leading up to the conference, the organizers planned how to make guests feel
at home without conveying any sense of celebration during the mourning period for
the country’s beloved leader. Change, flux, was in the air. It seems now, in retrospect,
that we could feel it.
The editors of this book knew that we wanted to edit a volume as a result of
the conference, and thus we eagerly shared our experiences listening to panels that
inspired us: challenges to the literary canon, new ways of thinking about World
Englishes, discussions about translation that accounted for Western paradigms and
their shortcomings, pedagogical papers that considered the global classroom from
decentered or newly centered perspectives. What we knew in those days was that
the center could not hold: the current cultural moment, even before we understood
the pandemic, even as we were continuing to grapple with massive global political
reckonings, necessitated change. And though as editors, colleagues, and friends,
we’d been talking about this for years, how and why English departments seem to
be the final frontier for upholding and reifying essentialist notions of value, why
even in global spaces we see an attenuation toward antiquated heuristic tools and
texts; whether there was any valid reason to maintain standard varieties of English
vii
viii Preface
and the Western literary canon, we felt energized by a gathering of so many like-
minded peers from around the world. We began to believe that these weren’t radical
conversations; people were having them everywhere.
In the weeks and months following the conference, COVID-19 became everyone’s
reality. Now, at the time of publication of this volume, in this moment of still and
after, the very meaning of linguistic and literary studies is being reshaped by the
global pandemic and increasing political polarization. The texts printed here offer
new ways of reading and understanding our discipline and our pedagogy at this
particular moment in history. The two-part structure of this collection is designed
to feel as much as possible like that final conference pre-pandemic, an organized
conversation that critically and probingly links analyses of language and translations
studies in English Departments from across the globe and literary pedagogy with an
eye toward moving beyond past flaws to broaden the field in the twenty-first century.
The essays we’ve chosen are broad in their range and provocative in their arguments
and recommendations. The first section of our collection provides analyses of how
and why English Studies can be in the twenty-first century; the second section offers
readings of a variety of literary texts within the context of the first section’s analyses.
Coming from very different, yet related perspectives, the editors of this collection
endeavor to identify how World Englishes, literary and linguistic studies, and the field
of translation are imagined in a global context, and whether these global paradigms
could influence the future of the discipline.
All the chapters in the first part of the book point out the inherent flaws with
language and translation studies in English Departments across the world. The chap-
ters consider how to broaden the field of English language and translation studies in
the twenty-first century.
The section begins with Balasubramanian’s chapter, which focuses on the state of
the art of English Language Teaching (with a focus on EFL contexts). The chapter
examines why, despite repeated calls for the recognition of the pluricentricity of
English, language classrooms are still dominated by Inner Circle, traditionally L1
varieties of English. The section concludes with a chapter by Sarah Hopkyns, whose
arguments are similar to those made by Balasubramanian. Hopkyns describes that
despite significant advances made in the field, native-speakerism still has a strong
presence both in students’ ideologies as well as in recruitment practices all over the
world. She concludes with practical ways to move beyond the native-speaker/non-
native-speaker binary.
Chilton’s essay focuses on recognizing and more fully articulating what univer-
salism means in developing and shaping classroom practices in the humanities.
Essentially, he suggests re-thinking pedagogical practices, specifically of a literary
nature, in order for literary studies to remain sustainable in a world that increas-
ingly views literature as a commodity; in essence, he proposes re-shaping literary
studies from being results-oriented to process-oriented. In a similar vein, Knell-
wolf King introduces an interdisciplinary humanities course, which teaches Social
and Emotional Learning as a means of equipping students with the skills needed
to make them better able to function in a more inclusive society. She argues that
English studies be re-thought to focus on skills that contribute to students’ openness
Preface ix
to cultural differences, and that equip them with the necessary interpersonal and
communication skills to function in today’s global world. Both Chilton and Knell-
wolf King, then, propose a movement away from hegemonic universals steeped in
western ideology toward empathic universals.
Making an argument similar to that made by Knellwolf King, Hofmyer stresses the
need to better prepare students for today’s increasingly interconnected world. With
a focus on Japan, her proposal is that language classrooms focus less on linguistic
competence, still dominated by traditionally native-speaker norms, whether British
or American, and focus more on cultivating intercultural communicative competence
in students.
The chapters by Bennoudi and Kahlaoui focus on translation studies today.
Bennoudi, in her chapters, discusses the translation of Mohamed Choukri’s novel,
For Bread Alone. While praising the skill of translator Paul Bowles in making the text
accessible to a western audience, Bennoudi, is, nevertheless, clear in her critique of
certain strategies employed by Bowles, strategies she labels “manipulative”, resulting
in a text that is skewed toward the sensibilities of a western audience. Kahlaoui’s
paper focuses more on grammatical issues in translation, specifically between English
and Arabic in EFL contexts. In describing the problems students face when trans-
lating aspect from English to Arabic, Kahlaoui stresses the need to update available
pedagogical grammars to better reflect the working of language in natural contexts;
students’ translation errors, he claims, stem from their continued reliance on conven-
tional prescriptive grammars, which focus exclusively on the norms of an Inner Circle
English.
The papers by Hendrix, and Lake and Lee, both discuss how instruction in a
one-size-fits-all variety, namely Standard British or Standard American English do
not prepare students to function successfully in today’s global world. Hendrix and
Lake and Lee focus specifically on pedagogical issues in writing classrooms. With a
focus on an EFL context like the Sultanate of Oman, Hendrix discusses the obstacles
still facing the inclusion of a more World Englishes-based pedagogy, particularly in
writing classrooms, and concludes with a list of recommendations on how this can
be accomplished. Lake and Lee focus on the need to transform academic discourse
communities’ concept of acceptable writing.
The Haswell and Schachter chapter is notably different in its format. The paper
focuses on describing a series of interviews conducted by the authors with experts
on English as a Lingua Franca, World Englishes, and English as an International
Language. Through the interviews, presented in the form of a podcast, the authors
demonstrate the clear pedagogical implications on scholarship on World Englishes,
English as a Lingua Franca, and English as an International Language, scholarship
that points, in no uncertain terms, to the importance of the language classroom moving
away from Inner Circle Englishes. What is perhaps most relevant about this chapter,
however, is that it demonstrates, as Hendrix, Balasubramanian, and Hopkyns all
stress in their chapters, that a re-envisioning of the very concept of what is academic
is possible. The authors present the podcast as an alternative to traditional methods
of disseminating academic information such as publishing in journals.
x Preface
Part II of this volume, “On Literature and Culture,” weaves together the present
and possible future(s) for literature in a variety of contexts. For all authors of all
the chapters in this section, the past is the past, and the present requires a reckoning
of canonical notions that serve to reify dominant academic paradigms, particularly
those that reaffirm Western hierarchical models and make only superficial movements
toward inclusivity and equity. The future, as seen in this section of the book, is
exciting, extending beyond the original vision of Weltliteratur into a literary terrain
that encourages something beyond comparativism,
Chapter 11, “When They See Us: Using Texts of Affirmation in the Global Litera-
ture Classroom” calls for the decolonization of the literary canon, a reconfiguring of
the center to (a) allow students to see the value in their own literature as a starting place
and (b) to encourage students in Western, predominantly white spaces to disconnect
from a personal and social attachment to the center. Anna Fancett, in Chap. 12, bridges
the temporal and geographical distance between China Achebe and Sir Walter Scott,
discussing the similarities between the authors’ uses of orality. This chapter dispels the
notion of the oral as simple, showing us that in these texts, orality is indeed as critical
as the written, appearing straightforward, all the while presenting us with cultures and
ways of being that are exceedingly complex.
Mary Wardle writes about novelist Jhumpa Lahiri’s decision to “abandon” English
and write in Italian, and how a new language, importantly not English, serves as
a space of liberation at the intersection between language, culture and translation.
Mary L. Tabakow and Staci Strobl, in Chap. 14, “Border Skirmishes: Questioning
Blurring Boundaries Between Fiction and Nonfiction,” ask what it means to run up
against the edges of what nonfiction can be, and what this means to different cultures,
societies, and age groups. In a global context, creative nonfiction is more important—
and more fiscally powerful—than ever before, so what’s true and what’s embellished
matters, everywhere.
Inas Younis delivers a thoughtful analysis of the cultural imaginary, using Mohsin
Hamid’s Exit West to show the enduring importance—and potential for disruption—
of imagined borders and communities. Khulud Al-Mehmadi looks at the spread of
ideas through translation, noting the strategic, measured decisions Kamil Kilani made
with Gulliver’s Travels, and what meaning this makes upon the text, with implications
for the larger field of children’s literature. Kodhandaraman Chinnathambi, in his
chapter on indigenous Canadian autobiographies, presents the most important voices
on the very prescient topic of Native education in the Americas, indigenous students
and their parents. Their stories are organized here without the point of view of the
government, or the oppressor, and from a truly global viewpoint.
Rosalind Buckton-Tucker’s essay in Chap. 18 considers the cross-cultural
dynamics of humor, how for humor to be successful in travel literature, it must meet
certain criteria; it shows us how humor is universal and simultaneously culturally
unique. In Chap. 19, Azzeddine Bouhassoun considers how two Algerian novel-
ists, Zaoui and Daoud, traverse notions of linguistic and cultural independence and
dependence, intellectual quest, and cultural alienation through their narrators. In the
final chapter, Cyrus Patell uses a cosmopolitan approach to view the text of Franken-
stein as a global text, leading us on a journey of the text’s “global cultural heritage,”
Preface xi
exploring first the text’s cultural legacy, as well as the interplay of sameness and
difference, the universal and the particular, the global and the local.
One could do worse than to be a student, scholar, or seeker of cosmopolitanism,
to think deeply of what it means to be a world citizen, not rooted to anywhere
and at the same time respectful of everywhere. This collection explores identity
through language, through literature and through culture, is dissatisfied with tradi-
tional comparisons, with continuations of hierarchies, institutional determinations
of value, and seeks solutions in new ways of approaching the word, the text, and
what they can mean in relationship. The editors of this volume hope that readers can
find answers to new questions here. We would like to thank all contributors for their
words and ideas, as well as for their patience and persistence. Special thanks also
to the College of Arts and Social Sciences at Sultan Qaboos University and to the
Department of English Language and Literature, whose 2020 conference, Exploring
Cultural Intersections, was the initial inspiration for this anthology. Thanks to confer-
ence organizers Dr. Fathiya Al-Rashdi and Dr. Sandhya Rao Mehta, as well as to
Dr. Khalsa Al-Aghbari and to the editorial staff at Springer, in particular Satvinder
Kaur, without whose support none of this would be possible.
Muscat, Oman Kirsten Hemmy

2021 Chandrika Balasubramanian
Contents
Part I On Language and Culture

1 World Englishes in the EFL Classroom: The Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chandrika Balasubramanian
2 A Global Conversation on Native-Speakerism: Toward
Promoting Diversity in English Language Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Sarah Hopkyns
3 World Englishes, EMI, and State-of-The-Art International
English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Christopher G. Haswell and Jonathan Shachter
4 Decolonizing the Composition Classroom Through Inclusion
of Localized Global English Varieties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Tim Hendrix
5 Lexical Bundles of Stance in Upper-Level Argumentative
Literary Essays and Expert-Level Literary Criticism Articles:
A Comparative Dispersion Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
William Michael Lake and I-Hsien Lee
6 Translation Beyond the Margins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Hanan Bennoudi
7 Student Translators Between Pedagogical Grammars
and Language at Work: The Case of Aspect in English
and Standard Arabic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Kahlaoui Mohamed-Habib
8 Incorporating Intercultural Competence into EFL
Classrooms: The Case of Japanese Higher Education
Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Ana Sofia Hofmeyr
xiii
xiv Contents
9 Creative Cultural History as a Medium for Social

and Emotional Learning: Teaching Students to Present
the Stories of Their Community Across Cultural Boundaries . . . . . . 131
Christa Knellwolf King
10 Universalist Pedagogy and the Future of Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . 149
Myles Chilton
Part II On Language and Culture

11 When They See Us: Using Texts of Affirmation in the Global
Literature Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Kirsten Hemmy
12 Orality in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Walter
Scott’s Waverley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Anna Fancett
13 Rejecting the (Step)Mother Tongue: Jhumpa Lahiri’s
Translingual Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Mary Wardle
14 Border Skirmishes: Questioning Blurring Boundaries
Between Fiction and Nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Mary L. Tabakow and Staci Strobl
15 The Cultural Imaginary in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West:
A Transnational Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Inas Younis
16 Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as Mediated by Kamil
Kilānı̄: A Bourdieusian Account of the Translator’s Habitus . . . . . . 235
Khulud M. Al-Mehmadi
17 Identity Politics and Education in Select Native Canadian
Autobiographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Kodhandaraman Chinnathambi
18 The Cross-Cultural Dynamics of Humor and the Benign
Violation Theory: An Application to Travel Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
Rosalind Buckton-Tucker
19 (Hi)story and Fiction in the Algerian Novel: Particular
Reference to Amin Zaoui’s Le Miel de la Sieste and Kamel
Daoud’s Meursault Contre-enquête . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Azzeddine Bouhassoun
Contents xv
20 What Does It Mean to Be a “Global” Text?: The Example

of Frankenstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
Cyrus R. K. Patell
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
About the Editors
Kirsten Hemmy’s book of poetry, The Atrocity of Water, was a Tom Lombardo
selection for Press 53 (2010). Hemmy is currently completing a book on Muslim
women in history (2022). Her poetry has recently appeared in Sonora Review, Alaska
Quarterly Review, Bellingham Review, Southern Humanities Review, Glass Poetry,
and elsewhere. Hemmy, a recipient of the Linda Flowers Literary Award for Poetry,
is a two-time Fulbright scholar (2003 and 2012) who currently lives in the Sultanate
of Oman, where she teaches world literature and creative writing at Sultan Qaboos
University.
Chandrika Balasubramanian’s book Register Variation in Indian English (2009)

was one of the first large-scale empirical, corpus-based investigations of variation
within an international English. While she predominantly has published on World
Englishes, and specifically on Indian English, she has also published on various
areas of language pedagogy, and her recent work focuses on the pedagogical impli-
cations of World Englishes scholarship. Balasubramanian currently lives and works
at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman, where she teaches sociolinguistics
and language.
xvii
Abbreviations and Symbols
AAP Association of American Publishers

BANA Britain, Australia, and North America
CEFR Common European Frame of Reference
CNF Creative Nonfiction
DH Digital Humanities
EFL English as a Foreign Language
EIL English as an International Language
ELF English as a Lingua Franca
ELT English Language Teaching
EMI English as a Medium of Instruction
ESL English as a Second Language
GELT Global English Language Teaching
ICC Intercultural Communicative Competence
IELTS International English Language Teaching System
JEMI Journal of English as a Medium of Instruction
L1 First Language
L2 Second Language
LB Lexical Bundle
LCA Literary Criticism Article
LCW Literary Criticism Writing
MEXT Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, Technology (in Japan)
MICUSP Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers
MSA Modern Standard Arabic
NAR North American Review
NELP National English Language Plan/Policy
NF Nonfiction
NNS Non-native Speaker
NS Native Speaker
PBL Project-based Learning
RULER Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, Regulating
SDG Sustainable Development Goal
xix
xx Abbreviations and Symbols
SEL Social and Emotional Learning

SL Source Language
ST Source Text
STEM Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics
TBL Task-based Learning
TEIL Teaching English as an International Language
TESOL Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
TL Target Language
TOEFL Test of English as a Foreign Language
TT Target Text
WE World Englishes
WL World Literature
YA Young Adult (Literature)
Part I
On Language and Culture
Chapter 1
World Englishes in the EFL Classroom:
The Reality
Chandrika Balasubramanian
Abstract As recently as the mid 1960s, English programs in both the UK and the
US were mostly focused on national views of language, and the English language
has been studied from the perspectives of two largely monolingual countries (Bolton,
in ‘Thank you for calling’: Asian Englishes and ‘native-like’ performance in Asian
call centres). Despite the vast changes, English departments have seen in the last
60 years, including calls for the recognition, and indeed acceptance, of the pluri-
centricity of English, a movement away from a largely monolingual ideology that
has, at its center, the idea that English has a single standard, little has changed
in the language classroom, particularly in EFL contexts. Theoretical discussions
about English and Englishes abound, and today, even though World Englishes-based
language teaching pedagogy is increasingly discussed, such discussions have not
moved beyond the theoretical. Attempts to integrate either new varieties of Englishes
into the language classroom, particularly in EFL contexts, have been met with oppo-
sition at best and hostility at worst. This paper begins with an overview of scholarship
on World Englishes and then examines first the role of World Englishes scholarship
in general, followed by an account of the role of the academic world in perpetuating
the powerful position of Inner Circle varieties today. It concludes with a section on
how best WE-informed pedagogical practices might be incorporated into language
programs and classrooms.
Keywords World Englishes · EFL · Globalism · Classism · The classroom ·

Postcolonial
Emergence and Development of World Englishes
The field of World Englishes (WE) was created and has developed over the past six
decades into a robust discipline because it has become increasingly clear that the
notion of a single standard English creates tremendous room for marginalization.
C. Balasubramanian (B)
Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman
e-mail: chandribala@squ.edu.om; chandribala@gmail.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 3
K. Hemmy and C. Balasubramanian (eds.), World Englishes, Global Classrooms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_1
4 C. Balasubramanian
Kachru, arguably the strongest proponent of the field, argued for a recognition of
English not as a single standard language, but as a diverse entity with many centers
of prestige. WE as a discipline, then, gained popularity because it problematized the
hitherto accepted notion of the native-speaker, a notion that took as a given that Inner
Circle countries, and specifically the US and the UK, set the English language stan-
dards for users of English in the rest of the world. Even the term “World Englishes,”
the pluralizing of English, was to demonstrate not just an acceptance, but the advo-
cacy of an idea that the language belongs to whoever uses it as a first language,
or an additional language, whether “in its standard form or in its localized form”
(Kachru & Smith, 1985, p. 210). The reason World Englishes, as a discipline, has,
over the past several decades, blossomed into a rigorous field of study, is undoubt-
edly due to the rapid and hitherto unpreceded spread and subsequent diversification
of the language into numerous new varieties. Today, it is widely recognized and
accepted that numerous localized varieties of English exist all over the world, and
they are variously called World Englishes, International Englishes, and New Varieties
of English.
The study of World Englishes started from anecdotal accounts of variation within
a certain national variety, followed by more empirical accounts of various inter-
national varieties. While earlier empirical studies focused more on differentiating
various international varieties from traditional native-speaker Inner Circle varieties,
later scholarship, focusing more on legitimizing the different international varieties,
studied the variation within a new international variety. These later studies are more
corpus-based, and study different international Englishes with a view to providing
descriptions, describing register differences within them, and ultimately, focusing
on the variety emerging as a norm-provider (as opposed to remaining dependent on
Inner Circle norms), when hitherto, only traditionally native varieties from the Inner
Circle countries had been regarded as norm-providing.
Indian English is one of the new international Englishes that has been studied
now for several decades. One cannot think about the present-day status of English in
India without recalling the words of Macaulay (1835) (cited in Kachru, 1976), after
which it was introduced to the Indian education system:
We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and
the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English
in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the
vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed
from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying
knowledge to the great mass of the population.
A few decades later, Charles Wentworth Dilke, on the necessity for the teaching
of English in India said the following:
So long as the natives remain ignorant of the English tongue, they remain ignorant of all
the civilization of our time—ignorant alike of political and physical science, of philosophy
and true learning…English, as the tongue of the ruling race, has the vast advantage that its
acquisition by the Hindoos will soon place the government of India in native hands, and thus,
gradually relieving us of an almost intolerable burthen will civilize and set free the people
of Hindoostan. (Dilke, 1872, p. 224)
1 World Englishes in the EFL Classroom: The Reality 5
And so English, and the Queen’s English to be specific, came to occupy a central
position in the Indian education system, and education systems all over the world. The
assumption was that someone without access specifically to the variety of English
of the educated Briton was not “fit” and would remain “ignorant.”
With the spread and diversification of English with globalization, however, it
became increasingly apparent that the numbers of people using English as a second
language (such as those in India), and as a foreign language far exceeded the tradi-
tional native users of the language. Continuing to accept a single standard, therefore,
means perpetuating the hegemonic practices and attitudes advocated by Macaulay
and Dilke. Today, with 60 yearsof WE scholarship as evidence, Yano (2001) states
that “even though the distinction between standard and non-standard use of English
remains prevalent in the field today, the notion of native norm has become more
than ever, questionable as a plurality of norms have started to emerge: Speakers
of English, native and non-native alike, are increasingly aware of the existence of
different norms and English for global use should be dissociated from the norm of
any English-speaking society” (Yano 2001, p. 129, cited in Deshors, 2018, p. 10).
So, what does this awareness mean in language classrooms, particularly those in
EFL contexts like the university in the Gulf, where I teach? Unfortunately, not much.
Native speaking teachers of English—British, American, Australian, Canadian, or
those from New Zealand, are still valued far more than are those from countries like
India, perpetuating the marginalization of the latter. The next section focuses on the
possible role of WE scholarship itself for the continued dominance of traditional L1
Englishes.
The Role of WE Scholarship in Perpetuating the Continued

Dominance of L1 Englishes
World Englishes scholarship has been extremely prolific in the past several decades.
While there is no denying all the field has accomplished in our understanding of how
English has spread and changed, I’d like here, to provide a critique of the nature
of much WE scholarship to date. By addressing what WE scholarship has accom-
plished, I also must acknowledge the gap, and discuss what it has not sufficiently
accomplished: an alternative or alternatives to the use of the English of the white
world, the colonizing powers, in Departments of English across the world.
Back in 1997, Graddol described the rapid spread of English as a global commu-
nication tool, predicted its continued spread, and predicted that it would “continue to
exert pressure towards global uniformity, requiring mutual intelligibility and common
standard” (p. 56). While Graddol’s prediction has proven true in terms of the sheer
spread of English, its globalization has, rather than maintaining a “common stan-
dard,” resulted in the development of a huge variety of Englishes around the world,
with mutual intelligibility between them not always being assured. In other words, to
quote Mair, “the more English spreads globally, the more heterogeneous it becomes
internally” (2013, p. 255).
Linguists and sociolinguists alike have been fascinated with the spread and results
of the spread of English. Particularly robust has been the line of scholarship focusing
on models of World Englishes, and no scholar of World Englishes is unaware of
Kachru’s Concentric Circle Model. Since then, however, the field has seen the devel-
opment of many other models, and today, earlier models including Kachru’s Concen-
tric Circles, McArthur’s Circle of World English Model (1987), and Modiano’s
Model of English as an International Language (1999) are widely critiqued. Later
models, such as Schneider’s Dynamic Model, focusing on the evolution of a new
variety of English, have critiqued earlier models for having been based on too colo-
nial a framework. Mair, for example, is clear in his critique of older models and
how they fail to address the idea that “what dominates the linguistic ecology of the
world today is not one standard language, but the whole English Language Complex”
(2013, p. 275).
Theoretical models such as Mair’s certainly warrant recognition for their call
for WE to move away from mere geography in the construction of certain national
varieties, to the influence of what he calls a hub variety, namely, Standard American
English, being a factor to consider when discussing the development of any national
variety. While his model is groundbreaking in terms of acknowledging the world
superpower, what it still does not fully explain is how (or if) new varieties, particularly
those in post-colonial contexts, enjoy prestige, particularly in contexts outside their
country of origin. Similar critiques have, however, been leveled against even recent
models such as Schneider’s Dynamic and Transnational Model (2016), Buschfeld
and Kawtzsch’s (2017) Theoretical Model of Extra and Intra Territorial Forces simply
because they still do not grasp the complexities of today’s global spread and status
of English. What this line of scholarship on models of World Englishes fails to
accomplish is a line of thought beyond the abstract and theoretical.
Further, while critiques such as those of Mair, arguing against static models such
as Kachru’s are certainly valid, what they fail to acknowledge is that at the heart of
models such as Kachru’s and even Schneider (2013), is the idea that some varieties
(traditional ESL varieties like Indian English) are norm-developing, while other
varieties (traditional EFL varieties) are norm-dependent. The idea of some World
Englishes being norm-developing is an important one if one is to truly accept the
idea that non-native varieties of English are just as valid as traditional native ones.
The idea took hold in World Englishes scholarship, with calls for some ESL varieties,
Indian English being one among them, to become pedagogical models. This seemed
a shift in the field from being an almost entirely theoretical one to one that was
now addressing pedagogical implications of such hitherto theoretical ivory tower
ruminations.
But where have we gone from here? WE scholarship over the past few decades has
produced a wide range of handbooks and has contributed significantly to traditions
established in fields such as sociolinguistics and dialect geography, particularly since
the development of modern computer-based corpus linguistics methodology, which
has allowed for investigations of different international varieties of English with a
depth not formerly possible. However, while scholars such as Schneider (2016) might
claim that WE scholarship has also produced textbooks such as those of Mesthrie and
Bhatt (2008) and Schneider himself (2011), these are textbooks that are more suitable
for the theoretical components of graduate or upper-level undergraduate curricula of
TESOL, Applied Linguistics, or Sociolinguistics programs. These textbooks provide
no practical guidelines to how WE can be taught in the language classrooms of the
world. They are books about WE, their spread, their structures, but are certainly not
books on how to teach WE. As early as 1996, Sridhar stated that reliable descrip-
tions of various WEs were essential to produce reference grammars of the varieties.
Today, reference grammars exist, but those reference grammars have resulted in few
textbooks that are used in an ESL or EFL classroom setting.
The models do accomplish a lot—capturing the complexity of today’s World
System of Englishes (Mair, 2013) and the immense diversity in this system. But
returning to the issue of the continued dominance of L1 Englishes in language class-
rooms, particularly EFL classrooms, I argue that the reason the colonized position
of English departments across the world, including in the Gulf, remains a reality is
largely because WE scholarship has remained theoretical. The pedagogical implica-
tions, and implications for language policy, have, by and large, stayed suggestions.
In other words, while WE scholarship has focused on the need to move away from
the simplistic native/non-native dichotomy, the scholarship has provided no concrete
ways of accomplishing that in pedagogical terms: in academic settings, therefore, the
native/non-native distinction is alive and well. The department and university where
I work (as well as other institutions of higher learning in this part of the world) illus-
trate this well; as mentioned before, in their preference for native-speaking teachers
over non-native-speaking teachers, a strong preference for “correct” English, and
a generally prescriptive attitude toward grammar. Irrespective of what course the
students take, the evaluations of all their work have a language component in them—a
language component that is based entirely on prescriptive, established, native-speaker
norms, and my department is by no means an exception.
Schneider (2016) is right in his claim that in today’s world, “World Englishes have
become an important component of global sociolinguistic reality” (p. 254). What I
question, however, is his claim that they are not merely “elusive objects of a scholarly
ivory tower” (p. 254). While the international varieties themselves are not exclusive
to the ruminations of those inhabiting a scholarly ivory tower, scholarship on them
remains so. Outside the scholarly ivory towers of the world, in both the western
world and outside, WE are still regarded as largely ungrammatical or accented; to
the non-linguist (and even to many linguists), the different and unfamiliar accents,
words, or structures that constitute WE are still regarded as wrong, particularly when
intelligibility either is an issue, or becomes an issue because of a listener’s attitude.
The next section focuses on the role of academia in perpetuating this status-quo.
Standard L1 Englishes Versus World Englishes: The Role

of Academia in the Maintenance of a Status-Quo
In such a discussion of the pedagogical implications of WE research, it would be

wrong to not acknowledge the power Inner Circle, and in specific, Standard British
and American Englishes still have in the world. English has for long been recognized
as essential for success. Kachru claimed that in India, possessing a knowledge of
English was like possessing the famed Alladin’s lamp. However, it is not just English
that is a passport to privilege in the world; it is certain prestigious varieties of English.
I argue that academia has played a major role in allowing Inner Circle Englishes to
maintain their stranglehold. The next three sections focus on the role of academia
in maintaining the status quo first on (a) language teachers and professionals, (b)
students of English as a second/foreign language, and (c) notions of what academic
discourse itself is.
Language Teachers and Professionals
That scholars, particularly those from the countries of the Periphery, still face obsta-
cles, because the varieties of English they use, is well documented. Kumaravadivelu
(2016), known for his work on ELT pedagogy, for example, is honest in his account
of his difficulty in entering the world of publishing simply because of his non-native
status. He explained that after much struggle, he realized that mainstream publishers
were not interested in his work simply because he wasn’t considered enough of an
expert (even in ELT methodology)—because of his status as a non-native academic.
Lee and Canagarajah (2018) explain that there are many studies that show that non-
native English speaker teachers are consistently less tolerated than native-speaker
English teachers because of their non-native status. Indeed, they explain, even the
continued use of the binary “reifies the underlying ideologies promoting language
nativity and ownership” (p. 352). Similarly, Orelus (2018) shows how subaltern
professors in predominantly white institutions face various forms of discrimination,
not the least of which is because of the variety of English they use: “…those who speak
English with a distinct accent routinely face intersecting forms of oppression, like
accent and language discrimination…” (p. 170). The recognition in Orelus’s paper
of such discrimination at predominantly white institutions is noteworthy; Gerald
(2020), a black American scholar and language educator, shows that the discrimi-
nation is not attributable to a simplistic native/non-native distinction. Any user of a
variety of English that is not Standard American (and therefore, white), or Standard
British, is prey to similar discrimination. He goes so far as to say that the field of
ELT “frames whiteness as both a prize and a goal” (p. 44) by discriminating against
users of English that are not white.
In considering the reasons for the maintenance of a status quo in academic settings,
it is impossible to put aside the idea suggested by Milroy and Milroy (1985) that the
attitudes and suggestions of linguists seem to have little effect on the regular general
public, who still consult dictionaries and handbooks for “correct” language use;
who look at academics, therefore, to provide them with what is “correct”. Further,
another issue to consider when considering the advocacy of WE in classrooms, is who
is doing the advocating? Most of the voices calling for change come from scholars
from the Center. Kumaravadivelu (2016) explains that for WE scholarship to truly
make a difference in discontinuing the marginalization of vast numbers of largely
non-white communities of the world, the voices advocating change need to come not
from the Center, but from the Periphery. Kumaravadivelu and Canagarajah are two
scholars who do represent the voices of the periphery. What is telling, however, is
that though both scholars (and they are two among many others) have, for years, been
very vocal in their call for language classrooms to become more embracing of New
Englishes, their own writing follows native norms, the norms of prestige varieties.
Bolton (2006) reiterates this point when he explains that even today, academics from
communities belonging to the periphery still face “difficulties in finding a voice in
major journals in the field (although notable exceptions include English Today and
World Englishes), as well as in book production” (p. 263).
It would, therefore, be remiss of us not to also consider whether the voices calling
for these changes are unconsciously serving the advertising of the “specialness of the
mediating first world” person? (Gandhi, 1998, p. 85, cited in Pourqoli & Pouralifard,
2017)). Is this why the calls come largely from either white voices, or those who
have already “made it,” and not those who are still striving for a foothold into the
rarefied air of the chambers in which the former live and thrive? In other words, by
seeking to de-dichotomize the us-other contrast, are we essentializing it?
In speaking to a few of my colleagues at my university, it is clear that their attitude
toward teaching my students about WE or allowing them to use features of Arabic
English are not favorable at all because they are convinced that they will be doing
their students a disservice. As one colleague put it, there are still gatekeepers, all
of whom advocate the use of native-speaker norms. In an EFL context like Oman,
then, the belief that students need to approach native-like proficiency in English to be
able to succeed in a career continues to come in the way of WE-based pedagogical
practices.
Applied linguists have often been criticized for not being aware of the realities
of the communities whose language use they study and document. Schneider, while
accepting that “Authorities and politicians everywhere promote the standard variety,
partly for fear of losing competitiveness in international communication, notably
business” (p. 212), still maintains his conviction in people’s ultimate ability to over-
come institutional obstacles and use their varieties of English,—citing Singapore as
an example where the public’s “strong and stubborn defense of the use of Singlish
against an official government position” as evidence. What Schneider, and most other
scholars supporting the use of WE pedagogically do not, however, address, is the
contexts in which varieties such as Singlish can be used. Certainly not in academe. In
most Outer and Expanding Circle countries, people’s motivations for learning English
are still, by and large, instrumental. While that remains a reality, academic notions of
correct and incorrect will remain, and local varieties of English will continue to grow
and perhaps flourish, only in certain contexts. Entry into certain professional fields is
still very much governed by one’s ability to have at one’s command the prestigious
varieties of English, and while that remains true, native-speaker norms will still be
preferred to new varieties of English.
Students
The role academia plays in maintaining the status quo with respect to students’
attitudes toward the valued position of native-speaker norms is also well documented.
Jee (2016) claims that in Korea, students’ favorable views of Inner Circle speakers
of English, and students’ desire to learn English from Anglophone speakers from
an Inner Circle country stems from their “imagined” world, where one assumes that
speaking native-like English is directly related to success in the Korean job market.
One wonders how “imagined” their world really is. Jee explains that while World
Englishes are “practically and locally” (p. 241) used, unfavorable responses to and
perceptions toward various international varieties of English are well documented.
In many EFL contexts, even today, Bourdieu’s argument that “the power of English
as a symbolic system in the global linguistic market is such that its legitimacy tends
to be uncritically accepted” (1992, p. 5) remains true and continues to refer to Inner
Circle varieties of English.
Another study in an EFL context that focuses on students’ positive attitudes toward
L1 Englishes is Kang and Rubin (2009), which shows that even today, students’ atti-
tudes play a major role in their ability (or supposed inability) to understand the
English they were listening to. Suzuki (2011), reporting on the use of international
varieties of English in the EFL classrooms in Singapore, showed that students consid-
ered varieties such as Singaporean English or Indian English “peculiar” (p. 150).
Balasubramanian (2009, 2016, 2017) also shows that with Indian English, spoken
registers show, by far, the greater use of Indian grammatical forms. However, with
written registers, Indian forms are still not frequently used, particularly when one
considers written academic English—where both published and unpublished student
work show very few Indian grammatical structures. This point was again made clear
by other scholars studying other WEs in classroom settings, such as Hamid (2014),
Kamwangmalu (2013), Wang (2016), to name just a few. All these studies reveal
by and large, students (and teachers) in various EFL and ESL contexts are more
comfortable accepting WE forms in students’ spoken work, but not in their written
work.
When scholarship on WE started gaining momentum, Quirk (1990) cautioned
strongly against promoting WE over standard English in classroom settings: “to
displace Standard English from the center of attention is to deny learners access
to the wider world of international communication” (p. 14). He continued that “It
is neither liberal nor liberating to permit learners to settle for lower standards than
the best and it is a travesty of liberalism to tolerate low standards which will lock
the least fortunate into the least rewarding careers” (pp. 22–23). “Students ‘liberally’
permitted to think their ‘new variety’ of English was acceptable, would be defenseless
before the harsher but more realistic judgement of those with authority to employ or
promote them” (p. 24).
Notions of Appropriateness in Academic Discourse
An important factor that contributes to WE scholarship remaining largely theoretical

is that our notion of what is appropriate in academic discourse has not changed at
all. Duff (2010) defined academic discourse as “forms of oral and written language
and communication—genres, register, graphics, linguistic structures, interactional
patterns—that are privileged, expected, cultivated, conventionalized, or ritualized,
and therefore, usually evaluated by instructors, institutions, editors, and others in
educational and professional contexts” (p. 175). How true Duff’s definition is even
today is clear when considering the teaching of writing in academic settings, for
example, even recent scholarship still focuses heavily on form and accuracy-based,
of course, on British or American models of English—over meaning or creativity.
Scholarship (Abrams, 2019; Swain, 2000) on the assessment of L2 writing in a class-
room, for example, is entirely based on grammatical and lexical accuracy, syntactic
complexity, and vocabulary diversity. This ever-present focus on form, specifically
a focus on grammatical accuracy and vocabulary, in second language acquisition
research is particularly significant for EFL university settings where students are
learning not only the language, but getting degrees, either undergraduate or graduate,
in English. The gap suggests that as much as the disciplines of Applied Linguistics
and ELT have stressed a need to move away from a purely accuracy-based model of
language teaching, the reality is that it has not. If the field of ELT is still so focused
on accuracy, and accuracy is defined by the standards set by American and British
varieties of English, what chance exists for WEs to become pedagogical models?
And, perhaps more importantly, the question to ask is this: which World English
should become the pedagogical model? Further, in addition to classroom tests, well-
established and powerful English language tests such as the TOEFL and the IELTS
are still fundamentally connected with native-speaker norms. Language classrooms
are, even today, much more tolerant of new English structures in spoken English, but
not in written English (Balasubramanian, 2017). Elder and Davies (2006) are frank
in their criticism of the acceptance of WEs in assessment and suggest that calls for
new approaches to the assessment of WE structures are “stronger on politics than on
applied linguistic realities” (quoted in Davies 2006, p. 86). As much as we’d like to
think otherwise, ELT professionals have not moved their classroom practice away
from an ideology that privileges Kachru’s Inner Circle varieties.
The picture I have painted thus far is grim. I have discussed the obstacles the
integration of WE into language classes face, particularly in EFL and ESL contexts,
and it seems that scholarship on WE will continue to remain theoretical. There are,
however, certain concrete moves language teaching practitioners can make to ensure
a wider representation of Englishes, even within academia. The next section provides
some suggestions.
World Englishes in Academia: Where Can We Go?
Matsuda (2018) explains that Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL),

alternatively called We-informed ELT is based on a desire to “move away from
teaching native-speaker competence” (p. 25). Matsuda hastens to add that EIL is
not a single homogeneous variety of English that is preferred, but one that views
English as a functional lingua franca that connects users from various linguistic
and cultural backgrounds. Matsuda focuses on changes in the language classroom
being a movement from a the space being a conveyor of linguistic (and specifically,
Inner Circle) structures, toward a space that facilitates a student’s acquisition of
intercultural competence, an ability to negotiate in an arena where there is more
ambiguity than not. Matsuda acknowledges that a language classroom should be a
place where pedagogical practices focus on “raising awareness of different varieties
of English and developing respectful attitudes” (p. 27).
Matsuda’s ideas, then, do not suggest that certain non-Inner Circle varieties
become pedagogical models. What Matsuda and other scholars of WE-based ELT
pedagogy suggest is that we make language classrooms more culturally-relevant to
the lives of learners, and move away from English representing just Western culture.
Matsuda rightly explains that “the proficiency in intercultural communication, which
is highly emphasized in TEIL” be the focus of language classes. One way of accom-
plishing this, a topic that has been explored in some depth in other chapters of this
volume, is by exposing students to more diverse literature, literatures in English from
various parts of the world; literatures through which students are not only exposed to
different Englishes but also everything the study of different varieties would entail,
linguistic and otherwise.
Early in the brief history of World Englishes studies, Kachru (1985) coined the
term “bilingual creativity,” which he defined as the process of designing texts using
the linguistic resources of two different languages, i.e., the languages a bilingual has at
his or her disposal. This bilingual creativity, Kachru explained, rather than producing
erroneous forms (as judged by the norms of traditional native varieties of a language)
of language, produces language that is distinctive, full of creative innovations, and
therefore, different from either one of the two languages in the bilingual’s repertoire.
The results of such bilingual creativity, Kachru claimed, include new varieties of
English, and new literatures in English that were redefining the English literary
canon. As evidence for his ideas, Kachru discussed the works of authors such as
Raja Rao and Chinua Achebe and showed that their writing was defined by patterns
of “code mixing, switching, and discourse,” in addition to Asian and African cultural
dimensions, rather than by patterns of native English morphology and syntax and the
cultural assumptions associated with the (largely white) Britain or America. Works
such as these, he explained, decanonized traditional literary conventions and genres

of English.
It is ironic that for as long as WE has existed and flourished as a discipline worthy
of study and given the reasons because of which it developed into as robust a field
as it currently is, that it has not more adequately addressed this possible solution: To
introduce WEs to students in the forms of diverse literatures, literatures that represent
cultures other than predominantly western white cultures, literatures written in the
Englishes used in these diverse cultures. By de-colonizing English Departments and
including works of literature from various parts of the world, written partly in their
various Englishes, then, we can introduce WE into language classes and help them
gain intercultural competence, without which it is becoming increasingly difficult to
function in a multicultural environment.
It has been shown by many scholars that nativized varieties of English such as
Indian English are much more acceptable in literature, where creativity, with the use
of traditionally “non-native” grammatical structures and lexical items, is stressed
because of the resulting flavor of the writing. More than acceptable, it is encouraged
and seen as a sign of good writing. Using a horticultural metaphor to describe the
diversity and spread of New Englishes, with a specific reference to their use in litera-
ture, Llamazon argues that a new variety of English can grow into a healthy plant by
virtue of its “fruits—the literary masterpieces of novels, short stories, poems, dramas,
and songs of its speakers and writers” (quoted in Bolton, 2006, p. 242). Authors of
creative genres do feel “freer” (Iyer, 1993, p. 53, quoted in Bolton, 2006, p. 242),
producing works that are “expressions of their regional identities and of community”
(Schneider, 2011, p. 212) by using their regional varieties of Englishes. The New
Englishes here are more accepted than any other written forms of New Englishes,
even within academia. It seems then, that exposing students to WEs through litera-
ture should be an obvious choice; as Ashcrot et al. (1989, quoted in Bolton, 2010,
p. 460) put it, “the very existence of post-colonial literatures completely undermines
any project for literary studies in English which is postulated on a single culture
masquerading as the original center.”
So why isn’t this happening more? What has come in the way of accepting more
diverse literatures? It seems that Macaulay’s well-known attitude about the general
superiority of English literature, an attitude he claimed was based on the “valuation
of the Orientalists themselves” prevails even today: “I have never found one of them
who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole
native literature of India and Arabia” (cited in Ramanathan, 1999a, b, p. 223).
Another reason could be a certain unwillingness on the parts of literature teachers
simply because of an unfamiliarity with non-canonical literatures. It is very possible
that instructors are reluctant to introduce non-canonical literature to their students
because of a lack in their own training in, and therefore, an ignorance of, non-
canonical literatures with their non-standard English structures. This begs the ques-
tion, however: Are we so complacent in our spaces that we cannot conceive moving
out of our comfort zones?
And then, perhaps, a way to accomplish what I suggest in this paper, despite all
the obstacles, would be to move the teaching of English language and literatures
outside the hallowed halls of academe. Perhaps, if English departments functioned

more to facilitate the pursuit of the soul rather than commerce, changes such as those
I discuss in this paper could be more easily realized. And then, perhaps, I dream.
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Chapter 2
A Global Conversation
on Native-Speakerism: Toward
Promoting Diversity in English Language
Teaching
Sarah Hopkyns
Abstract It has been over three decades since Paikeday’s “The Native Speaker is
Dead” was published, but alas the native speaker fallacy (belief that native speakers
are the ideal language teachers) is still very much alive and remains dominant in the
field of English language teaching. Although awareness of linguistic discrimination
and the racialization of English are widespread in academic circles, on the ground
such injustices are still common, as can be seen when browsing job advertisements
which often directly request “native speakers” (NSs). This chapter begins with a
series of autoethnographic accounts of the author’s experiences of native-speakerism
occurring globally. These accounts are used as a springboard for a multiple case
study exploring the attitudes and experiences of 130 adult learners and 72 English
language teachers in two multilingual and multicultural cities: Vancouver, Canada
and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Findings revealed that native-speakerism has a
strong presence in students’ ideologies as well as teachers’ recruitment and classroom
experiences. It is argued that the linguistic and ethnic background of teachers often
greatly affects their experiences. From a world Englishes perspective, the binary
terms “native speaker/non-native speaker” are problematized due to the complex
composition of English speakers today. Practical ways to move beyond NS/NNS
binaries and embrace diversity in English language teaching are advocated.
Keywords Native Speakerism · Diversity · English Language Teaching (ELT) ·

World Englishes · Linguistic imperialism
Introduction
Regardless of the language one is interested in learning, one thing remains the same,
the enticing draw of “native speaker” teachers. Marketing of language programs often
rests on native-speakerism ideologies where languages are associated with a certain
geographical location, accent, and image. This results in language discrimination or
S. Hopkyns (B)
Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
e-mail: sarah.hopkyns@zu.ac.ae
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_2
18 S. Hopkyns
linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2015) and often racial discrimination toward teachers

who do not “fit the image” of the language being taught (Kubota, 2019).
Teaching in Tokyo, working for a school which advertised itself with the slogan
“learn the Queen’s English,” I was interviewed in London and then flown over to
Japan in 2002 with a group of teachers who were all native English speakers and all
British, although very few spoke, or desired to speak, like the Queen. Each school
proudly displayed the Union Jack in its window and students were assured that
their teacher would be a native British English speaker. I did not think at the time
there was anything too unusual about this, and as I fit the description perfectly, I
felt comfortable and secure that I would be what the students wanted and expected.
As my first year in Tokyo continued, however, I became increasingly aware of the
social, racial, and linguistic injustices plaguing the ELT recruitment process not
only in Japan, but globally. While looking at further teaching opportunities, being
a “native speaker” of English was almost always an essential prerequisite, if not a
more specific requirement such as “must be a British English speaker” or “must have
a North American accent.” As De Costa (2019, p. ix) states with reference to English
teacher advertisements in China, it seems “accents matter.”
After moving to Vancouver, Canada two years later, aware of preferences some
students had for particular types of English, I felt for the first time that my nation-
ality may not work in my favor in quite the same way. Presumably these students had
chosen Canada rather than the U.K., for example, for a reason—would they be disap-
pointed by having a non-Canadian teacher? At my new Canadian college, however,
I saw that I was certainly not the only “outsider.” I was surprised by the diversity
of the teachers’ backgrounds. Apart from Canadian teachers, there were teachers
from the U.S.A., South Africa, Britain, and from non-Anglophone countries such as
Colombia, Serbia, Hong Kong, and Armenia. The staff room was a microcosm of
Canada’s multicultural society. However, despite the appearance of equality based
on its diverse faculty, the promotional video for the college featured only blond
Canadian-born teachers. In the same video, opportunities to interact with “native
speakers” as well as the college’s strict “English-only” policy were pushed forward.
It was a case of “hidden native-speakerism” as while a wide range of teachers were
hired, they were not equally valued publicly.
In my next teaching position in a university foundation program in the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), the diversity of the teachers fell somewhere between my mono-
national Tokyo days and the “global village” of Vancouver. With a vast majority of
faculty members coming from Britain, Australia and North America (BANA), only
two faculty members were bilingual in English and Arabic (the official language of
the country), but even they held American and British passports. This preference for
hiring “native speakers” in the Arabian Gulf was reaffirmed by a recent conference
experience in Oman just before the COVID-19 pandemic stopped all conference
travel. At the opening dinner of the conference, I was approached with the sentence,
“Hello, you are a native speaker, would you like to work here?” The same employment
offer was not extended to my equally qualified Emirati and Bruneian coworkers,
sitting either side of me.
2 A Global Conversation on Native-Speakerism: Toward Promoting … 19
Linguicism is not only present in the recruitment process but the notion of the
“superior NS teacher” also exists among teachers themselves. This became apparent
during examiner training for the International English Language Teaching System
(IELTS) in Canada and retraining in the UAE. During the training sessions, the
trainees (almost all NSs) were asked to assess candidates on videos. When a teenage
cockney speaker was interviewed, the trainees’ instinct was to automatically award
the speaker the top mark (Band 9—“Expert user”) for all the categories, seemingly
feeling that being a NS was the benchmark for perfection. However, it was revealed
to us, with some satisfaction, that this NS in fact was far from a top-scoring model.
When we looked at his language objectively, we could see that his vocabulary range
was limited, he was unable to fully expand, he used the same structures over and
over again and he also had pronunciation issues such as being unable to pronounce
the /θ/ in “think.” An Indian candidate, however, with excellent English scored much
higher as did a highly articulate Swedish candidate. I could not help looking back to
my Tokyo college, and indeed the Oman conference in 2020, and reflecting on what
an oversight it was, on the part of the employer, to assume NSs always had better
English skills than NNSs.
The series of autoethnographic accounts above illustrates the ongoing need to
investigate the issue of native-speakerism in the field of English language teaching.
As Zacharias (2019) explains, autoethnography, which is the researcher’s personal
or lived experience, can be used as a “point of departure” for further research. In
my case, these varied experiences over the span of two decades repeatedly raise the
question of what really matters to students—the skills and experience of English
teachers or their linguistic background and a certain profile? While previous studies
have shared perspectives from mainly one setting or from one participant group,
this study investigates the perspectives of both students and teachers in two diverse
cosmopolitan cities on two continents: Vancouver, Canada and Abu Dhabi, UAE. In
total, students and teachers from 24 different countries are represented, making it
global in scale.
Complexities Surrounding the Term “Native Speaker”
Definitions of the term “native speaker” are seemingly inexhaustible. According to

Davies (1991), the first recorded use of “native speaker” was a “bio-development”
definition which proclaimed that, “the first language a human being learns to speak
is his ‘native language’, he is a ‘native speaker’ of this language.” Essentially, this
means that someone who did not learn a language in childhood cannot be a NS of the
language. Cook (2003) argued that two further factors need to be taken into consider-
ation. In his threefold definition, he stated that NSs are: firstly, people who acquired
the language naturally and effortlessly in childhood; secondly, people who use the
language correctly and have insight into what is and is not acceptable (question of
expertise); and thirdly, a native speaker has knowledge and loyalty to a commu-
nity which uses the language. Although Cook’s definition presents a more complete
20 S. Hopkyns
picture, it can only be applied flawlessly to speakers of languages which are relatively
contained, such as Icelandic in Iceland, for example. For a language as diverse and
far reaching as English, the term is ripe with complications and “notoriously hard to
pin down” (Moore, 2018, p. 131).
Due to the far-reaching expansion of English, there is, for the first time in recorded
history, a language with more L2 than L1 speakers, which necessitates a redefinition
of traditional understandings of NSs of this language. While Kachru’s Concentric
Circles model (1985) has long been used to describe the global nature of English,
it has recently been problematized due to its emphasis on fixed geographical cate-
gories (Sifakis, 2018). Indeed, in today’s world, the increasingly dynamic nature of
English through global mobility has resulted in the circles merging and mixing, thus
producing a much messier and less symmetrical reality. As Sifakis (2018) points
out, as more and more people move around, languages travel and change with them.
Geographical orientation, in this sense, is far from simple and conversations in any
given location could involve interlocutors with linguistic backgrounds from any one
circle or combination of circles. Furthermore, we can see more and more people strad-
dling the circles due to possessing complex linguistic and cultural backgrounds. An
example of such a case is given in the popular textbook “Identity” (Shaules et al.,
2004) where a 30-year-old man “Peter” states.
When someone asks me where I’m from, I say ‘everywhere’. My parents are German, but
I was born in Nepal because my father was a diplomat. I grew up in India, Germany, the
United States, and Argentina. I speak Hindi, German, English, French and Spanish.
The terms “citizen of the world” and “global citizen” seem more appropriate than
any particular circle in cases like this.
The Ownership Debate
The spread of English raises considerable doubts about whose language it is, who can
lay claim to it, and ultimately can teach it. The question of “ownership” has been the
topic of much heated debate in the field of TESOL for the last three decades. On one
side, scholars such as Quirk (1990), argue that standard inner circle NS English is the
only legitimate model. Widdowson (1994, p. 378) compares this desire to protect the
“original English” with the exclusive French ownership of Champagne; here, the view
is that while other countries can create bubbly beverages, only the French produce
the genuine item. The privileging of NSs in this way leads to the belief that “the ideal
teacher of English is a native speaker,” commonly known as the “native speaker
fallacy” (Phillipson, 1992, 193–199) or “native-speakerism” (Holliday, 2006).
On the other side of the ownership debate, Paikeday (1985) made the first bold
attempt to counter the native speaker fallacy with the book The Native Speaker is
Dead. Davies (1991), Philipson (1992), Medgyes (1994) and Braine’s (1999) work
in the 90s led to further recognition of the uneven playing field NNS teachers face.
In the 2000s, scholars such as Kachru and Nelson (2001) and Jenkins (2006) argued
that as the standard language is inevitably the prerogative of a rather special minority,
regarding inner circle English as the “ideal model” clearly gives privilege to a small
elite group of NS teachers thus “turning every place into Periphery—or Coventry,
as British school children used to call it” (Dasgupta, 1998, p. 191). A decade later,
the topic took center stage at IATEFL, with Richardson’s (2016) powerful plenary
talk advocating the right for NNS teachers to be treated fairly in the industry. At
the same conference, the following year each delegate received a copy of Medgyes’
updated volume of “The Non-Native Teacher” (2017) at registration which further
emphasized that “ownership is not meant to be a binary measure” (Higgins, 2003,
p. 641), rather English should rightfully be owned by all its speakers.
Linguicism and the Racialization of English
Although in 1992 the executive board of TESOL passed a resolution which took steps
to abolish all forms of restriction based on the applicant’s native language (Medgyes
1994, p. 73), being a native speaker of English is often the main qualification to teach
English, and this requirement is explicitly stated in job advertisements. For example,
in Selvi’s (2010) study, it was found that 75% of ELT job advertisements reviewed
requested NSs. This is especially the case for private sector jobs (Pinner 2009).
Likewise, Mahboob and Golden (2013) analyzed 77 ELT job advertisements in Asia
and the Middle East and found that 87% had requirements relating to nationality or
being a native speaker. Even casually browsing popular websites advertising ELT
jobs in 2020, many clearly still request NS teachers, sometimes appearing in capital
letters (Fig. 2.1). Others may not overtly use the term “NS” in the heading, but when
clicking on the details of the job, applicant qualifiers include “must have a UK, USA,
Canadian passport” or “native speakers only.”
Fig. 2.1 Job advertisements in 2020 requesting native speaker teachers

22 S. Hopkyns
Lippi-Green (2012) argues that linguicism is rarely considered true discriminatory

practice as employers often argue that accented teachers may objectively be unsuit-
able for jobs where language plays as key role. In this sense, employers feel that
they have the right to choose the linguistic background of the teachers they employ
in order to “keep the customer happy.” Therefore, despite scholarly and advocacy
efforts to promote equality and social justice within the hiring process, the NS fallacy
remains a “ghost in the machine” (Cook, 2016, p. 187), or a “metaphorical ghost”
(Zacharias, 2019) which has a stubborn and shadowy presence.
Inadvertently tied to linguicism is “the racialization of English” (Aneja 2016),
where the image of English is “white.” As Charles (2019) points out, native English
teachers are assumed to be white and non-native English teachers are thought of as
non-white, with complexities within these categories often erased. As a result, there
is “a hidden racism within TESOL professionalism which is directed at so-called
‘non-native speaker teachers’” (Holliday & Aboshihia, 2009, p. 669). Kamhi-Stein
(1999, p. 151) relays a common experience for non-white NSs when stating, “not
a lot of institutes, particularly in Japan, want to hire Asian-looking teachers.” The
same attitude is directed toward African Americans as reported by job-seeker Sean
Jones, who when applying for an English-teaching position in South Korea in 2014
was sent a blunt text from his recruitment agency reading, “Hey Sean. Sorry they
just told me they actually want a white teacher” (Aljazeera.com 2014). Amin (1999,
p. 97), a Pakistani teacher working in Canada, explains that “the dominant perception
of native speakers is that firstly, they are white, and secondly, they have a particular
accent.” Even though she considers herself a NS as English is the language she
knows best, she states that, “when I self-identify as a native speaker, there is a look
of bewilderment, disbelief, and embarrassment on (peoples’) faces.” As Selvi (2014)
states, discriminatory employment practices very much include race, appearance
and “whiteness.” This can, conversely, benefit Caucasian NNS teachers who are
sometimes hired for positions which request “NS” teachers. Hansen (2004), for
example, recalls that despite being a Danish-NS, she was hired as a native English
speaker in Japan because of her race and American-sounding accent. However, having
NS status can also result in reverse racism where, especially in Asia, white teachers
feel exoticized, interchangeable, and foreign (Erling, 2017).
The Study
The current study investigates student and teacher views on “native speaker teachers”
in two different contexts: Vancouver, Canada and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
The Canadian phase of the study involved 30 students and 30 teachers. The UAE
phase was part of a larger research project, and involved 100 students and 52 teachers.
The research designs varied slightly according to the context, as explained below.
Across the phases and contexts, the study explored three key research questions:
(RQ1) How is a native speaker defined?

(RQ2) What are student preferences regarding the nationality of their English
teacher?
(RQ3) How does linguistic background of English teachers affect teaching
experience?
The study took the form of a multiple case study which gathered qualitative data
using open-response questionnaires and semi-structured focus groups. Using open-
response questionnaires made it possible to obtain a large amount of data in a rela-
tively short space of time. The students were given 20 min to complete the question-
naires in their class time, and the teacher participants were given a week to complete
the questionnaires. Using questionnaires also meant that for each study context the
questions were identical without the researcher coming between the participant and
the question and perhaps distorting the response in some way. Ethical clearance
from the institutions was granted beforehand and all participants signed consent
forms stating that their names would not appear in the reporting of the findings, and
they had the right to withdraw from the study at any time. The questionnaires were
designed to be user-friendly and unambiguous without leading questions. Disad-
vantages of using questionnaires such as lack of detail and the researcher being
unable to probe responses further were countered by the use of focus groups as
an additional data collection tool in the Abu Dhabi context. Focus groups allow for
different perspectives in an informal discussion and are, therefore, ideal for exploring
“people’s experiences, opinions, wishes and concerns” (Kitzinger & Barbour, 1999,
p. 5). They also challenge the power dynamics often found in standard interviews
by giving the participants greater control and turning the interviewer into more of a
facilitator or moderator.
The qualitative data were analyzed thematically. In this chapter, seven main themes
are presented, as seen in the findings section. Methodological and informant triangu-
lation were used due to multiple participant groups and data collection tools. Using
triangulation in this way served to “overcome the weakness inherent in any single
data collection source or procedure” (Bailey, 2006, p. 131/132). In the case of this
study, having data from both students and teachers also added to the validity of the
findings.
Context and Participants
The two study contexts, Abu Dhabi and Vancouver, have similarities in that they
are both large cities surrounded by stunning scenery, the desert for the former and
snow-capped mountains in the case of the latter. Vancouver is the third largest city
in Canada and Abu Dhabi is the capital and second largest metropolis in the United
Arab Emirates. Both contexts are multicultural and superdiverse. In Vancouver, 40%
of residents are foreign-born (Clapton, 2006) and the 5 most common surnames are
24 S. Hopkyns
“Lee, Wong, Chan, Smith, and Kim” (Coupland, 2009, p. 150). In Abu Dhabi, only
approximately 13% of the nation’s residents are Emiratis (Harris, 2013, p. 87) due to
the presence of expatriate workers from almost 200 other countries. Although Arabic
is the country’s official language, English is widely used as a lingua franca (Hopkyns,
2020). While the Abu Dhabi-based students were studying in their home country in
an English medium university, the Vancouver-based students were studying abroad in
a setting with many different L1s. Both institutions had “English-only” policies with
the Canadian college being particularly strict whereby students who spoke another
language were given a “red card” just as footballers who break the rules of the game
are given a red card before being immediately dismissed from the pitch. In both
settings, the teachers were mainly from Anglophone countries. Table 2.1 provides
more detailed biographical information on the participants.
While Table 2.1 provides necessary information about the participants, it should
be noted that complexities within the categories were frequent. For example, for
the two Vancouver-based teachers born in Hong Kong, one identified as a native
English speaker, and the other identified as a non-native English speaker. Teachers
and students of the same nationality often had different ethnicities and linguistic
profiles. Some teachers had dual nationalities. Therefore, diversity within a category
such as “North American English teachers” or “Emirati students” was wide.
Cluster sampling was used for the student questionnaire respondents in both
contexts, in that the students were in pre-existing clusters (classes). This included 3
classes of 10 students (n = 30) for the Vancouver context and 9 classes of approxi-
mately 12 students (n = 100) for the Abu Dhabi setting. For the student focus groups,
“purposive sampling” was used, which involved hand-picking those more likely to
provide detailed and valuable insights on the research topic (three groups of 6 in Abu
Dhabi). For the teacher samples in both contexts, all teachers were asked to either
Table 2.1 Student and teacher profiles

Vancouver-based Abu Dhabi-based
Teacher numbers and 30 (20 Canada, 2 USA, 2 Hong 52 (19 UK, 15 USA, 5 Australia,
nationalities Kong, 1 Serbia, 1 Colombia, 1 4 Canada, 3 New Zealand, 1
Montenegro, 1 Armenia, 1 UK, 1 Ireland, 1 Romania, 1 Tunisia, 1
South Africa) Belgium, 1 Mexico, 1 Turkey)
Student numbers and 30 (11 Japan, 10 Korea, 3 100 (100 UAE)
nationalities Germany, 2 Switzerland, 2 Brazil,
1 Saudi Arabia, 1 Taiwan)
Age Teachers mid-20s–mid-50s Teachers early 30s–mid-60s
Students 18–30 Students 18–24
Form of participation 30 teacher and 30 student 40 teacher and 100 student
questionnaire respondents questionnaire respondents
12 teacher and 18 student focus
group members
Total number of 60 152
participants
complete a questionnaire or participate in a focus group. In Vancouver, 30 teachers

were questionnaire respondents. In Abu Dhabi, 40 were questionnaire respondents
and 12 were focus group members (two groups of six).
Findings
The findings have been organized according to the three research questions, in which
seven main themes are presented. Participant names have been omitted to ensure
anonymity. For teacher participants, “T” is used and for student participants, “S” is
used. Questionnaire respondents’ comments are marked with “Q” and focus group
members’ comments are marked with “FG.”
RQ1: How is a native speaker defined?
In the Canadian context, participants were asked to define a “native speaker.” This
proved very difficult to do, with a total of nine different definitions given (Fig. 2.2).
Figure 2.2 shows that the students’ most common definition focused on “country
of birth.” The most common teacher definition related to age of acquisition. Both
groups’ second most mentioned definition related to expertise. One student stressed
the ease in which a NS speaks English by comparing it to breathing. Understanding
Western culture and having a particular accent were also common definitions, as seen
in Theme 1.
Theme 1: Common definitions of a NS relating to language control and accent
Someone who speaks a language with fluency and accuracy, with ease and speed. (T-Q:
Canadian, Vancouver-based)
A person who has complete language control. (S-Q: Brazilian, Vancouver-based)
Learnt English at school

Appearance
Long time in English-speaking country
Particular accent
Understands English culture Students
Speaks English in all areas of life Teachers
First language (learnt as a baby)
Born in BANA country
Full command of English (expertise)
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
Fig. 2.2 Vancouver-based participants’ definitions of a native speaker (number)

26 S. Hopkyns
They don’t have such a useless time for using their language like human’s breathing. (S-Q:
Korean, Vancouver-based)
Someone without a foreign accent. (T-Q: Montenegrin, Vancouver-based)
Definitions which were less predictable included NSs’ speaking English in all
areas of life, and a certain appearance (Theme 2).
Theme 2: Less common definitions of a NS relating to monolingualism and appearance
An English NS is someone who was raised in an English-speaking country and whose first
language is English. The first language in all areas of life is English—home, school, friends,
etc. (T-Q: Canadian, Vancouver-based)
“Has blonde hair” (S-Q: South Korean, Vancouver-based)
“Maybe their face” (S-Q: Taiwan, Vancouver-based).
From participant quotes in Themes 1 and 2, the concept of a NS is fuzzy at best.

The biographical data collected on the teacher participants, as seen in the previous
section, supports the difficulty in neatly separating teachers into binary NS/NNS
categories.
RQ2: Does the linguistic background of teachers matter to students?
In both the Canadian and Emirati contexts, students were provided with a list of
various nationalities from a range of countries and asked to tick the nationalities of
English teachers they would prefer. They could tick as many boxes as they liked and
there was space to include other countries or voice a lack of preference. We can see
that from Table 2.2 for both contexts “NS” countries take the top four places. In the
UAE context, the next most popular choice after “NS teachers” were teachers from
the UAE or Saudi Arabia who shared the same L1 (Arabic). In both contexts, teachers
from Germany or Poland were more popular choices than those from China or India.
This could be indicative of the racialization of English, where “whiteness” is tied to
English. However, without probing further, we cannot be sure this was the case. Only
nine students from the 130 chose other nationalities (Russia, South Africa, Sweden)
Table 2.2 Student participants’ preferences for the nationality of their English teacher
Preferred teacher nationality Students in Canada (%) Students in the UAE (%)
USA 93 78
UK 70 74
Canada 93 62
Australia 30 40
UAE/Saudi Arabia 0 38
Germany/Poland 7 24
China 3 4
India 3 2
Other answers: Russia, South Africa, 3 6
Sweden, Anywhere
or stated that nationality was not important (anywhere). This indicates the strength
of the native speaker fallacy in both contexts.
The most common reasons given for this NS teacher preference included a belief
that NSs are “experts” at the language, have greater confidence, and speak the “orig-
inal” language or the “real” language. NS accents were also seen as desirable and
there was an attraction to learning about Western culture through NS teachers sharing
outside perspectives. A selection of comments relating to these viewpoints can be
seen in Theme 3.
Theme 3: NS expertise, accent, authenticity, and culture
He speaks the language perfectly, you get used to the accent and sound of native speakers
(S-Q: German, Vancouver-based)
The language usage is real expressions. It is not phrases quoted by a textbook (S-Q: Japanese,
Vancouver-based)
Most of foreign people in our school now are from Canada and British. They are the most
perfect English teacher because they talk the original language (S-Q: Emirati, Abu Dhabi-
based)
These persons are “experts” in English (S-Q: German, Vancouver-based)
NSs have the confidence that perhaps NNSs lack (T-Q: Canadian, Vancouver-based)
Native speakers perform better when tired (T-Q: Hong Kong/Canadian, Vancouver-based)
The “iconizing” (Irvine & Gal, 2000) of NSs as perfect, ideal and real speakers of
English is enacted by teachers and learners from multiple countries, demonstrating
the widespread nature of the native speaker fallacy ideology. It is clear from the
comments that NS teachers are privileged and seen as superior. Similar comments
have been found in previous studies such as Hajar’s (2019) with Arab university
students studying in the UK who “felt lucky” (p. 9) to be taught by NSs and boasted
about having only been taught by NS teachers.
Participants were also asked to comment on NNS teacher strengths. The common
responses included being bilingual or multilingual, and if sharing the same L1 as
the students, NNS teachers were thought to be more culturally sensitive and more
tolerant of learner mistakes. NNSs were also seen as good role models having
learnt the language themselves. For some student participants, however, having a
NS teacher was so important that when asked to comment on NNS teacher strengths,
they responded with “nothing.” In contrast, a minority felt the linguistic background
of the teacher was unimportant compared to teaching skills and personality. Theme
4 illustrates the most common responses regarding NNS strengths.
Theme 4: Strengths of NNS teachers
Students can feel self-confident and less concerned about making mistakes (S-Q: Saudi
Arabian, Vancouver-based)
Maybe if I have something difficult, she will help me with Arabic language (S-FG: Emirati,
Abu Dhabi-based)
She knows my culture and how I act. Maybe if I make something wrong she will forget but
if another, I should explain (S-FG: Emirati, Abu Dhabi-based)
Nothing for me, especially English (S-Q: South Korean, Vancouver-based)
NNSs can act as a bit of a role model (T-Q: Canadian, Vancouver-based)
28 S. Hopkyns
Inspiring example (T-Q: American, Abu Dhabi-based)

Being a native speaker of Arabic (NNS) can help teach certain things better. I think a
language teacher MUST be bilingual. (T-Q: Tunisian, Abu Dhabi-based)
Although the comments in Theme 4 indicate that bilingual teachers are valued,
Table 2.2 shows that such merits are not seen as holding the same weight as those
attributed to “NS” teachers.
RQ3: How do the linguistic background and race of teachers affect teaching
experiences?
Teacher participants in both contexts were asked to comment on perceived advantages
and disadvantages they had experienced due to linguistic background. For the NS
majority, very few negative experiences were shared. NSs who did share negative
teaching experiences were based in Abu Dhabi and teaching classes of L1 Arabic
speakers. This led them to sometimes feel like an “outsider.” However, most NS
teacher teachers shared positive experiences such as students’ showing respect based
on their perceived expertise and “standard” accents as well as wanting to know more
about their country or culture (Theme 5).
Theme 5: The NS bias in ELT
A NS, rightly or wrongly, has come to be seen by prospective students as having a more
authoritative grasp of the language, while being free of non-English accents. This said, I
feel “NS” has been employed as a marketing tool (T-Q: Canadian, Vancouver-based)
As a native speaker, I have the advantage of being/appearing an expert (T-Q: Australian,
Abu Dhabi-based)
Students respect my knowledge of grammar and pronunciation (T-Q: British, Abu Dhabi-
based)
I think Emiratis, especially boys, like American things, cars, movies, food—many travel
there—advantage! (T-Q: American, Abu Dhabi-based)
I think it has been an advantage in terms of how we are perceived by Emirati students. They
want to have native English teachers teaching them, and many young Emiratis students have
often mentioned the value of acquiring a British/USA, etc. like accent (T-FG: British, Abu
Dhabi-based)
For the NNS teacher minority in both contexts, positive teaching experiences were
based on being a role model to students due to having learnt English successfully
themselves. However, in the Canadian context in particular, NNS teachers shared
mainly negative experiences related to how their linguistic backgrounds affected
employment opportunities and attitudes (Theme 6).
Theme 6: NNS discrimination
There was a school in Vancouver that would not hire me because they said they only hired
native speakers (T-Q: Serbian, Vancouver-based)
I was told it would be “inappropriate” for me to teach English. In another school, after
a short interview, I was told there was no way (she) could hire me because of my accent.
Students would complain. (T-Q: Montenegrin, Vancouver-based)
I was declined a job opportunity because my high school education was completed in Hong
Kong. The employer considered this a non-native English speaking education. (T-Q: Hong
Kong/Canadian, Vancouver-based)
I’ve felt a kind of “hidden” mistrust towards my language competency because of my being
a non-native speaker. (T-Q: Armenian, Vancouver-based)
Similar to the experiences voiced in Theme 6, Zacharias (2019) speaks of transna-

tional English teachers’ anxiety and constant struggles to establish credibility and
legitimacy, and Reis (2012) states that NNS teachers often feel like “underdogs.”
Furthermore, teachers in the present study commented on experiencing or witnessing
instances of racial discrimination toward NSs whose appearance did not match the
“image of English” (Theme 7).
Theme 7: Racialization of English
(In Asia) It seemed that teachers were treated with more trust and respect if they were
white—“the colour of English.” (T-Q: Caucasian Canadian, Vancouver-based)
In Korea, they would complain, you know there were a lot of complaints if you weren’t
from the United States, Australia or the UK and you didn’t look the part. (T-FG, USA, Abu
Dhabi-based)
I’ve been discriminated against before I even speak! I am discriminated against for my Asian
appearance rather than my linguistic background. (T-Q: Chinese-Canadian, Vancouver-
based)
Discussion: Toward Promotion of Diversity in English

Language Teaching
The findings of the study clearly demonstrate the mutual reinforcement of pro-NS
ideologies, employer bias toward NS teachers as well as racialized linguicism at
many levels of English language teaching. To move away from native speaker bias
toward the promotion of diversity in ELT, three key suggestions can be made.
Firstly, awareness needs to be raised as to what “real English” truly means. In the
findings, students often named “learning real English” as a reason for preferring NS
teachers. However, real English means something different for everyone who speaks
it. As most English conversational exchanges take place in multilingual international
contexts, “the choice of which variety of English to use- or even which language
for that matter—depends on the particular speakers involved and is thus unpre-
dictable” (Matsuda, 2018, p. 25/26). Paradigms such as English as a Lingua Franca
(ELF) (Sifakis, 2014), Global English Language Teaching (GELT) (Galloway &
Rose, 2015) and World Englishes-informed ELT such as TEIL (Teaching English
as an International Language) (Matsuda, 2012) emphasize diversity within English.
The message of embracing diversity and respecting English as pluralistic needs to
move beyond scholarly discourse and be present in promotional material and job
advertisements, which in turn will affect stakeholders’ language ideologies.
Secondly, the terms NS and NNS, which Kershaw (1994) describes as “shaky and
unprofessional” (p. 90), need to be rephrased or discontinued. The perception that NS
and NNS teachers are “different species” (Aslan & Thompson, 2017) or that “native
speakers are from Venus (and) non-native speakers are from Mars” (Selvi, 2016, p. 57)
is exacerbated by the binary labels “NS” and “NNS,” which, despite criticism in the
30 S. Hopkyns
literature, continue to be the most commonly used terms in the field. Less divisional
terms such as “proficient user” (Paikeday, 1985, p. 48) or “expert user” (Rampton,
1990, p. 98) refer to all those who can use a language successfully, thereby including
a spectrum of speakers. By disconnecting expertise from geographical location, the
emphasis switches from “who you are” to “what you know” (Rampton, 1990, p. 99)
which is undoubtedly a more just way to judge teachers.
Thirdly, “NSs are best” mentalities and ideologies can be challenged by increased
exposure to internationally competent English speakers from a range of backgrounds.
ESL teaching material such as textbooks and listening practices still tend to concen-
trate on inner circle NS models, which Matsuda (2018, p. 27) argues provide a
“disservice” to students by not exposing them to other Englishes as well. Patsko
and Goldstein (2018) emphasize the importance of “near peer” models in the class-
room, where students witness English speakers similar to themselves and see these
speakers as inspiring role models. Equally, awareness should be raised as to the
difficulties many NSs face when using English internationally. According to Jenkins
(2016), native English speakers are at a disadvantage in lingua franca situations
due to being less adaptive to different forms of English and using culture-specific
idiomatic and flowery language. Many scenes in Sofia Coppola’s film “Lost in
Translation” demonstrates this point well. In contrast, bilingual speakers are able
to use linguistic features more flexibly in order to maximize communicative poten-
tial. Translanguaging (Garcia, 2009), where full linguistic repertoires are utilized to
aid communication, is useful in global contexts. In this sense, L2 users of English
often have larger skill sets which are “out of the reach of monolinguals” (Cook, 2016,
p. 188).
Conclusion
This chapter began with a series of autoethnographic accounts which were used as
a springboard for case study research in two higher education contexts: Vancouver,
Canada and Abu Dhabi, UAE. The perspectives and experiences of both teacher
and student participants from a range of 24 countries indicated that the NS fallacy
remains a prominent ideology globally and continues to be used and abused as both
a marketing tool and a source of employment discrimination. Practical ways to end
this cycle of injustice include the reframing of “real English” away from NS models
toward diversity, making such diversity visible in promotional materials of language
programs and placing emphasis on teachers’ skills rather than profile. Following
post-structuralist discourses, the binary terms of NS and NNS should be abandoned,
and successful L2 users promoted in classrooms. A significant shift in the beliefs and
actions of stakeholders is needed if teachers of all linguistic and ethnic backgrounds
are to be treated equally within the field.
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Chapter 3
World Englishes, EMI,
and State-of-The-Art International
English
Christopher G. Haswell and Jonathan Shachter
Abstract “Lost in Citations” is an audio journal that was started in the spring of 2020
to create a platform for academics whose opportunities to contact other researchers
in various fields had been curtailed by the restriction of the COVID-19 outbreak.
What developed were a series of narratives based on the backgrounds of the intervie-
wees and the interactions of their reports with subsequent interviewees. This chapter
includes one of these narratives in relation to World Englishes, Global Englishes,
English as an International Language, English as a medium of instruction, and other
sociolinguistic concerns covered in six of our most popular interviews and how
their contents link together to form a up-to-the-minute picture of the state of these
interlinked fields of research.
Keywords English as a Medium of Instruction · World Englishes · Podcast ·

Global Englishes · English as an International Language
Introduction
English is a complex commodity of the modern world. Unlike other commodities,

though, there are very few obstacles that would entirely block an individual deter-
mined to develop the use of this valuable skill. In turn, industries “profit” by the exis-
tence of English as a global language by providing pathways toward improvement.
A developing language learner does not need to speak perfectly to attain personal
goals through the use of English. However, those tasked with teaching and testing
this language may ask themselves the following question: What is correct English?
The answer to this question, as it turns out, is harder to pinpoint than one might
imagine.
As a group, academics love to talk, either through direct communication or through
the texts they produce. Unfortunately, there have been few opportunities to make
contact with people in the field during the COVID pandemic as travel has been
C. G. Haswell (B) · J. Shachter

Fukuoka, Japan
e-mail: haswell247@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_3
36 C. G. Haswell and J. Shachter
restricted and conferences have been canceled. Therefore, the need to find alternatives
to opportunities to meet was high; we wanted to find an alternative to direct or written
academic discourse that could fill the space left by the lack of conferences. In this
space, we organized and produced a podcast series called “Lost in Citations” which
aimed at making contact with academics at various stages of their careers to give
a platform for their research efforts and for other interested people to hear of their
recent work.
As editors of the “Lost in Citations” podcast, we endeavored to speak with a wide
variety of academics from as large a swath of academic fields as possible. At the
time of writing this chapter, the “Lost in Citations” podcast has published over 80
interviews with contributors from Japan, the USA, Canada, the UK, Portugal, France,
Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Pakistan, Vietnam, Brunei Darussalam, Australia, New
Zealand, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Caribbean. These interviews form the contents
of our weekly podcast, but, even more than that, they also provide tangible examples
of knowledgeable and motivated individuals using English for their own purposes
(regardless of their individual linguistic backgrounds). In doing so, the contents of
our interviews may provide an adjunct answer to the above question: correct English,
as it turns out, may be irrelevant when the language is being used to share knowledge
in as broad a medium as possible.
World Englishes (WE) is a movement championed by Braj Kachru and Larry
Smith, work that has built upon for decades (Kachru, 1976, 1986, 1990). Their foun-
dation of the journal World Englishes paved the way for a generation of academics
to open the collective eyes of English users the world over to the wonder and variety
of Englishes in use. However, anyone looking from the outside of this field may
have seen a steady development of support for a change from World Englishes to a
more inclusive concept of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Popularized in the early
2000s by Professor Jenkins (2009) and discussed throughout this time in conjunc-
tion with researchers like Seidlhofer (2005, 2013) and Matsuda (2003, 2011), ELF
is a term that covers the function of English as a facilitating tool for transnational
communication.
As this area of research is the field of interest for Christopher Haswell, sociolin-
guistics has been the most often represented in our interviews. Published in March
2021 was our first report from this series of interviews and covered the issue of WE
and English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) (Haswell & Shachter, 2021). This
has been followed up with a continuing series of interviews leading from this report
creating what we term a “narrative” (i.e., as each previous interview inspires a new
contact, statements by previous interviewees can be referenced and form the basis
of future questions). As these organic narratives emerged, it was clear that (a) not
only could listeners receive information faster than reading a series of papers, but
(b) academics could propel the narrative faster by the interviewer accessing previous
interviews and asking linked questions. In short, we can learn what the people writing
crucial papers in the field are thinking and feeling at this very moment. The time lag
between submitting a paper for publication and being read by its intended audience
can be years; in our case, it may be a matter of weeks or even days between the
3 World Englishes, EMI, and State-of-The-Art International English 37
thoughts being expressed and them being published for any interested person to
hear.
The most common narratives that fall under the ever-broadening umbrella of
English as an International Language (EIL) are English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and
English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI). Of the 80 published podcast interviews,
18 have been centered on one or both of these fields of research, and several others
have touched on these topics, however briefly.
A breakdown of a podcast narrative that was built up around issues relating to the
issue of the use of English in the classroom, where each interview specifically quoted
a previous guest and built on the developing “story,” was covered in a previous paper
(Haswell & Shachter, 2021). This chapter will cover some of the points raised in that
paper but will seek to extend the understanding of these fields our listeners will have
gained through their time listening to the podcast interviews. We will list the links
to these specific interviews at the end of the chapter.
The interviews specifically covered in this chapter are:
1. Dr. Aya Matsuda,
2. Dr. Jennifer Jenkins
3. Dr. Ana Sofia Hofmeyr,
4. Dr. Nobuyuki Hino,
5. Dr. Diane Pecorari,
6. Lisa Hunsberger.
However, where appropriate, references will be made to other interviews from
the podcast project. We invite you to listen to them at your leisure. The following
narrative of interviews is written from the perspective of Christopher Haswell.
(Authors’ note: As we are dealing with the transcribed testimony of interviewees,
grammatical inaccuracies may occur, as are natural with all spoken texts. Some of the
sentences have been truncated to avoid repetition, and only altered when the overall
meaning became unclear. Some original textual grammatical inaccuracies remain;
the number included after the quotes is the time code in the interview).
Dr. Aya Matsuda, Arizona State University

(USA)—Interview #12
Paper discussed: Matsuda and Friedrich (2011). English as an international language:

A curriculum blueprint. World Englishes, 30, 332–344.
Date of podcast publication: June 12, 2020.
Although ELF is one of my major research interests, this interview was the 12th
published overall. The difficulties of sourcing interviewees early on in the run of
the project were one contributing factor, but, in all honesty, it takes time to build up
the courage to speak to a person who has been my most cited author. The paper we
were discussing specifically was one that had influenced several previous publications
(Haswell & Hahn, 2016; Haswell & Hahn, 2018). The main topic of conversation was
the background to establishing the legitimacy of EIL, its relevance and connection
to the field of ELF, and trying to predict future developments in both fields.
When asked about her background, Dr. Matsuda said her work came at a time
before most academics were fully ready to accept it as a legitimate field of linguistic
inquiry: “When I first started sharing some of the ideas, which I now call teaching
English as an international language, some people, some of the reactions were like,
Oh, so this is about being politically correct, or, oh, yeah, you’re a nice person. So,
you don’t want to offend anyone by saying your English is wrong…I felt like some
people responded well, but only because they saw some parallelism or compatibility
between what they thought I was promoting to these ideas and their way of thinking
or ideology that really embraces diversity and promotes respect for differences”
(05:25). This was certainly a response 20 years ago, but the field has developed,
and we have academics like Dr. Matsuda to thank for their work to move the field
forward.
Dr. Matsuda went on to describe the great disconnect with how education
ministries have focused on English for ‘international communication’, but applied
their focus very narrowly: “In Japan, the Ministry of Education, or many private
language schools promote English, that you have to know English because it’s a
global language…But yet, once you go to the classroom, at least, I started talking
about this, the focus was almost exclusively on the United States and American
English, or British, UK, English. But, if these students learn English, and if they
really go out to the international world, that will include more than US and UK, and
they might go out there and they think, oh, what is happening, I’ve never heard of
these different kinds of Englishes and I’m not ready to talk to these people, then I
thought that there’s a disconnect between the way we are selling the language and
the way we are preparing our learners. And we are doing a disservice to our learners
by not exposing them to the whole set of the reality of the English-speaking world”
(06:35).
The focus on American or British English as being the standard for English as
an international language does not, in Dr. Matsuda’s view, preclude the importance
of these varieties, depending on context: “There might be situations where … you
may prefer to sound like a native speaker… I think that’s a socio-linguistic reality of
any language in any society. And, I can understand that depending on the goal, that’s
the direction you want to strive for…I think of these goals as contextually defined
things, I don’t think that they will be one variety that will work in any situation …
that’s another reason that I’m skeptical of the idea of one international standard…. to
think that there is one or that it’s worthwhile to try to create one?” (17:18). This final
point would inspire a question I would soon ask Dr. Jennifer Jenkins as it related to
the concept of English as a Lingua Franca, as Dr. Matsuda was alluding to Lingua
Franca English as a possible, but likely undesirable, a new variety of the language.
Dr. Matsuda provided an illuminating start to the process of using this podcast
project as a method of data collection. She was, as expected, knowledgeable and
engaging, but also positive about the opportunity to speak directly to a researcher
in the field and discussing issues that are often mentioned in papers but, due to
word limits and other constraints, cannot be aired completely. Our discussion of her
linguistic background and how this affected her thoughts about the English she would
teach a person based on context were ‘on-brand’ but fascinating to hear first-hand.
Dr. Jennifer Jenkins, University of Southampton

(UK)—Interview #14
Paper discussed: Jenkins (2009). English as a lingua franca: Interpretations and

attitudes. World Englishes, 28(2), 200–207.
Date of podcast publication: June 24th, 2020.
Soon after the completion of the Dr. Aya Matsuda interview, I received a positive
response to my request for some time to speak with Emeritus Professor of English
at the University of Southampton, Dr. Jennifer Jenkins. It was in this interview that I
could begin to mention the previous discussion from other interviews, specifically the
interview with Dr. Matsuda and the concepts of World Englishes as a sociolinguistic
reality rather than political correctness and the current state of English as a Lingua
Franca.
We spoke first about ELF and how it could be defined in the current era: “It’s a
bit tricky to give a definition because the definition has changed over the years as
we’ve understood the phenomenon better. But, I guess there’s a very basic one: It
means communication among people who have English among the languages they
speak, possibly their only language, but usually more than one, and they’re using
English to communicate with each other, and possibly other languages as well. As I
say, it’s very difficult to give a definition now, but English used for communication
between people for whom it is not the only language, the first language present”
(00:51). Therefore, it can be said that EIL and ELF experts have a very similar way
of viewing the language, based on their testimonies. When I asked her about WE
and political correctness, Dr. Jenkins’s response was definite: “I don’t know if you’re
asking me whether I agree with that. But I certainly do” (02:17). This was not a
surprising response, but it was definitive: the academic on the vanguard of ELF did
not consider it to be something that was being promoted to placate other populations
of English speakers or to cover for the issues of former “native speakerism” (Halliday
(##). ELF was the pluricentric approach to English as a global language Braj Kachru
and Larry Smith had long advocated.
On a side note, Professor Jenkins did not begin her career as a language academic;
she began as a high school English language teacher who recognized the route English
as a global language was taking. Her route to being one of the foremost academics
in her field may not be the most traditional but it is one that has made her a well-
informed and highly motivated advocate of ELF in its truest form—she works to help
teachers of the language at various stages of their career and in numerous different
contexts to recognize and adopt a pluricentric approach to language teaching and

learning.
I then asked about the issue of “native-speakerism” and the problems Dr. Matsuda
alluded to for Japanese users of English not understanding first language users of
English if they travel to the USA or UK: “One of the things I think you learn when
you learn other languages is you learn about accommodation, you learn about the
need to adjust the way you speak for the benefit of the people, your person you’re
speaking to. And one of the problems with so many monolingual English speakers is
that they don’t understand. It’s not necessarily I mean; it may not usually be that they
don’t want to be understood. They don’t want to make it easy for the other person,
they just don’t know what to do unless they do speak other languages” (13:25).
Therefore, an ELF mindset requires even mono-lingual or mono-varietal users of
English to be aware of their context and be ready to alter their performance to make
accommodations for their interlocutor.
From these two interviews, my understanding of the state-of-the-art of WE and
ELF was greatly assisted. Both Dr. Matsuda and Dr. Jenkins are oft-cited experts
in their fields, but to hear them explain their positions with their own voices was a
fascinating experience. It was also an experience I would have been unable to have
without the medium of interaction being an interview. I was beginning to grasp the
value of the tools I had been afforded by the use of the podcast format.
Dr. Nobuyuki Hino, University of Osaka (Japan)—Interview

#31
Paper discussed: Hino (2012). Endonormative models of EIL for the Expanding
Circle. In Matsuda, A. (Ed.) Principles and Practices of Teaching English as an
International Language (pp.) 28–43.
Date of podcast publication: October 21, 2020.
Another often-cited academic in my writing is Dr. Nobuyuki Hino from the University
of Osaka. He was very positive about the opportunity to speak about his work, and
our conversation led to an even greater elucidation of what ELF and EMI mean in
the Japanese context. Dr. Hino’s approach to EIL is one that highlights a difference
between previous generations of sociolinguistic thought: “first of all, well, we should
be careful about any categorization. Okay, not only the nation-state framework, once
we categorize something we could have unless we are very careful, we could have
stereotyping and labeling and even othering…there’s that danger without the inherent
danger of any categorization. There, especially the nation-state framework. Well,
Japan has a very negative history of English language teaching from that viewpoint.
Look at the English language textbooks. During World War Two in Japan, textbooks
were limited in those days in wartime. And, then America was in Britain was still
out there were English textbooks, well, but the content was they try to exclude Anglo
American culture. And they try to hold the superiority of Japanese culture, though,
so that was an ethnocentric textbook, although it was English for Japanese values.
…. so nationally, is really worked negatively against EIL. On the other hand, as we
have been talking about nationalism in the outer circle … it’s really a double-edged
sword (15:27). Dr. Hino is right to point out the use of English to represent national
values, even ascribe values to other countries, whether correct or not, and that we
should be mindful of this when advocating for EIL.
One major issue that has been raised in connection to the increasing use of English
in academia and as a medium of instruction in classes traditionally taken in one’s
first language is the rise in reference to the Common European Frame of Refer-
ence (CEFR), particularly in relation to high-stakes testing. The state of high-stakes
testing requires some introduction as it relates to sociolinguistics. The issue is rarely
with the linguistic skills of the rater; most are highly qualified individuals with
advanced degrees and years of teaching experience. The questions lie in the connec-
tion to consistency: the linguistic landscape raters inhabit, and within which profess
to correctly judge proficiency, is constantly changing. It is also not the job of raters to
undertake self-training in modern sociolinguistics. The work of Browne and Fulcher
(2017) highlights this issue very well and has been widely cited by their peers in
the field of high-stakes language testing (Dr. Browne was a later interviewee on
the podcast): familiarity with certain varieties of English can change rater biases
in speaking test ratings, leading to certain accent varieties being graded lower and
a commensurate increase in the recommendation of American and UK accents for
English language learners. Neither of these are welcome outcomes for those with an
ELF-centered teaching approach.
I asked Dr. Hino if he had concerns in this area: “Firstly, we shouldn’t be worried
too worried about testing, right? Because testing is, in a way, about results. And we
should be more concerned with teaching first and then testing. So, if we say because
testing is difficult, we should not do this. That’s the other way around…yes testing
of EIL is a complicated [issue] … but it should be possible, what is required is the
widening of the scope, diversification of standards, but it should not be really impos-
sible. For example, a while about testing, for receptive skills, tasks involving varieties
of English can be given such as listening comprehension questions on conversations
between say, Chinese English and Brazilian English talking about Greek culture”
(27:40).
He continued, linking his thoughts and work to the conversations with Dr. Matsuda
and Dr. Jenkins: “And if I may add one more thing. I think probably the most difficult
part is to test the communication skills, interactive skills in EIL. Really, that’s the key
for English as a lingua franca, especially “How can you measure their communication
strategies, what we’ve been doing that is a subjective way. How can we do that more
objectively? That’s really a task we may be faced with” (29:47).
To finish our discussion, I asked Dr. Hino what we, as language teachers,
researchers, and proponents of an ELF mindset among our students and peers, could
do to help this process: “I think we should continue with what we are doing now.
Where we should publish more on the teaching of EIL and ELF and where the English
is. The thing is traditional, these scholars and also scholars were more interested in
theoretical aspects and pedagogical practice, in a wider scale began just maybe a
decade ago or so something like that. Rather recent, although it’s really in full bloom
now … we should continue with this pedagogical application of EIL and the world
Englishes to the actual classroom. We should write reports and give presentations
or not pedagogical practice and share with other teachers. And we should develop
materials in EIL, and many other things” (37:26).
Dr. Ana Sofia Hofmeyr, University of Kansai

(Japan)—Interview #46
Paper discussed: Hofmeyr (2020). Development of Intercultural Competence as a

Result of Internationalisation-at-Home Initiatives: Case Studies of Two Top Global
Universities in Japan. (Doctoral thesis).
Date of podcast publication: February 10, 2021.
Dr. Hofmeyr was interviewed about her doctoral research, which was fresh in her
mind as the interview occurred mere days before her final viva (which was ulti-
mately successful). I first asked her about her specific research project, investigating
the intercultural competence of Japanese university students: “I was looking at how
programs at these domestic campuses could develop intercultural competence and
specifically, I was looking at extracurricular programs because quite a lot of research
has been done on EMI, for example, English as a medium of instruction program-
s…And so what I expected to see really was that these programs would directly impact
intercultural competence in domestic students’ participating in these programs… but
what happened was that it was not a direct relation. …students, prior experiences
or experiences prior to enrolling in university had more influence than what actu-
ally happened on campus” (01:22). This is ELF in action: students using English
to improve intercultural communication. However, it was not the EMI courses that
were affecting this confidence in their competence, it was the prior experience of
using English—the courses either needed to be better defined or better implemented.
Such a conclusion suggests that students entering universities may have more of
an ELF mindset than initially believed. Dr. Hofmeyr concluded, “if they felt more
confident in their intercultural skills, they were more likely to enroll in extracurricular
programs with an intercultural focus, they were more likely to engage with interna-
tional students outside of these programs, and they were more likely to engage with
the multicultural campus in general” (16:09). This is a positive outcome but suggests
more should be done among the university staff and faculty to prepare and encourage
students outside of class, not just expecting EMI courses to be sufficient.
Dr. Hofmeyr did suggest the next route of investigation, following Dr. Hino’s
encouragement to keep working in the field, specifically encouraging the use of
materials from cultures other than those of first-language English-use countries:
“I think if I had the budget, rather than motivation, I’d really focus on increasing
students’ understanding of other cultures, their intercultural knowledge, and skills,

other than language skills because I think most of the budget does go to foreign
language skills at the moment. But the reason why there was such a gap between
intercultural motivation, and what students actually did was that students had almost
no confidence in their knowledge about other cultures and in their skills to be able
to communicate with other cultures. So actually, if I had the money, that’s where I
would invest it, I guess” (21:07). Hearing this, I was hopeful that she would find a
source for this funding in the near future. The beauty of the podcast is we can check
back in the future to continue this narrative of university research.
Dr. Diane Pecorari, City University of Hong Kong (Hong

Kong)—Interview #48
Paper discussed: Pecorari and Malmström (2018). At the crossroads of TESOL and
English medium instruction. TESOL Quarterly, 52(3), 497–515.
Date of podcast publication: February 24, 2021.
Our previous paper (Haswell & Shachter, 2021) covered the interviews of the first
five people on this list and produced a narrative that suggested ELF was in a state
of conflict with EMI in that the increased use of English in academic spaces was
leading to danger for minority languages in various contexts, a position suggested by
Professor Ahmar Mahboob of Sydney University. In that interview from September
2020 (Interview #24), Professor Mahboob expressed his opinion that EMI was a
“terrible thing,” a statement that suggested the next direction I should take when
investigating the continuing narrative. Although a person with a very positive view
of language use for personal improvement, Professor Mahboob is concerned with
language ecology; every language should be protected and allowed to thrive in its
own way and not lose domains of use due to dominant transnational languages such
as English. One such domain is within education systems, where increasingly the
language of instruction is English; this trend is particularly noticeable and contentious
in locations without significant historical contact with English but also where English
was historically the language of the imperial oppressor.
I contacted Professor Dr. Diane Pecorari from City University Hong Kong, the
new editor-in-chief of the Journal of English as a Medium of Instruction (JEMI),
to which Professor Mahboob had specifically alluded. Professor Pecorari shared
her time with me in order to discuss the new journal she and her editorial board
were setting up. She was aware of Professor Mahboob’s position on the journal but
was little taken aback by the vociferous nature of his comments. When asked about
Professor Mahboob’s comments, she said “I think it’s a real concern. It’s and it’s a
concern at two levels, right? At the societal level, there’s, there’s a reason for concern.
There are very many people who are concerned that EMI may result in domain loss.
This is a very big issue in the Nordics. Sweden is the most populous Nordic country
with just 10 million people. So, then you look at Norway with something like three
or three and a half million people, Denmark is a little bit larger than Norway, it’s
smaller than Sweden. The number of people who speak Scandinavian languages is
very, very small. And that’s one of the reasons that EMI has the toll that it has in
the Nordics…. there’s a real concern among many people, that Swedish or the other
Scandinavian languages will just cease to have an academic domain. So that’s one
area of concern (14:55).
Dr Pecorari did give us another thought to keep in mind as it pertains to the point
of potential domain loss, specifically with regard to academia but also in real-world
situations: “academic discourse is nobody’s mother tongue. So, you’ve gone to school
in your local language your whole life, you’re a professional, one user of the local
language, and then you get to university. And even if you attend university, in your
L1, you become a language learner again, because you’re learning that new foreign
language, you’re learning academic discourse. If you get to university, and you’re
attending classes and reading textbooks in English, then you’re learning academic
discourse in English and not in your first language. So, you’re training to be a midwife,
or you’re training to be a veterinarian, and you’re reading in your textbooks and
learning in your clinical practices about mastitis. And then you have to talk to a
Cantonese-speaking dairy farmer, about the health of the dairy herd. How have you
learned? How have you learned to say, mastitis in Cantonese, and using the word that
real people use rather than the word the textbooks use? So, at the end of the digital
level, there’s also I think, a real reason to ask whether EMI is crowding out other
languages. (17:10).
In addressing Dr. Mahboob’s criticisms directly, I asked if the new EMI journal
would take into account the possibility that producing an EMI-specific journal would
elevate the status of the methodology, thereby increasing the possibility of English
taking the place of L1 in content-based classes. She replied, “I suspect, at one level,
that in terms of editorial policy, there’s very little that we need to do to ensure a
critical and balanced perspective on EMI because of my experience, and it is perhaps
somewhat paradoxical. The people in a university who are most concerned about
English and its potential negative consequences are precisely English linguists, …
our mission is to bring a great breadth to the EMI question and to elicit a wide range
of perspectives on it” (24:21).
Given her position as the editor for an EMI journal, Dr Pecorari went on to say,
“there are concerns about EMI, but EMI is here to stay; King Canute found out there’s
no pushing back the tide. EMI is with us. It is a fact of life in higher education, and
increasingly in secondary education and extending into primary education. So, what
do we do if we want to avoid some of the potentially negative consequences? How
real are the negative consequences? All these things that we worry about? Are these
worries well-founded? It would be really great to see some research addressing those
questions” (27:53).
One issue that can arise is on the side of policy: what do universities favor, possibly
in spite of the best intentions of teachers. I asked Dr. Pecorari if this tension, in
the field of EMI, was something she saw being addressed by her efforts: “I don’t
think it’s primarily a balance of power question … I don’t think for example, that
the situation is that administrators love EMI and teachers hate it. I think that they
probably either like it or don’t like it for different reasons. I think administrators like
EMI because it makes it very simple to tick the internationalization box to fill up
seats in classrooms…. So, if there if there’s any kind of balance of power divided, I
would suspect that it’s more to do with academic disciplines, rather than to do with
levels of the university. I think the differences we see across those levels are more
about why you think EMI might be good or might be bad” (22:54).
Being able to address criticisms of policies and methodologies relating to EIL
directly to the experts, particularly people like Dr. Percorari who are policy-makers
in their own right, was becoming a clear advantage of the podcast medium. Dr.
Pecorari has the authority within the field and, with her position as Editor-in-chief
of a journal specifically focused on the field in questions, she is in the position to
make decisions that directly affect the information being passed through to academics
interested in EMI. The speed with which these views could be communicated was
also an advantage: Professor Mahboob was interviewed in September 2020, two
other experts on EMI in Japan, Dr. Annette Bradford and Dr. Howard Brown were
interviewed in September and November respectively on such issues as domain loss,
before the interview with Dr. Pecorari in February 2021. Within just a few months,
we had heard concerns, responses, and then promises from the head of a new EMI
journal that these concerns will be addressed and given space to be aired fully. Such
a speed of information dissemination rarely happens in academia.
In relation to ELF, I asked Dr. Pecorari about the language-use policies at her
university, specifically, if L1 use is allowed, recommended, or not allowed. She said,
“Here as in many places, the use of the L1 is very much frowned upon. One of the
questions on our teaching evaluations that has to be asked every class is “did my
teacher use English as the exclusive medium of instruction? And if the answer to
that is anything other than Yes, the teacher is in trouble. And, and yet, even at a big
university like City you so in, in a very competitive environment, my University City
University of Hong Kong, is ranked in the top 50 universities in the world by the QS
rankings. So, we are very competitive, we’re able to attract the very best students,
there is a widespread recognition that students are not able to do everything in English,
so wandered down the hallway, and eavesdrop outside the classroom. And yes, you’ll
hear explanations being given in Chinese, you’ll hear definitions or translations being
given in Chinese. Now, as a linguist, I hear that and I think, well, translanguaging.
Excellent. We need more of this, but university administrators would say no, no, we
need less of this. And I, you know, I’ve spoken about my own university, because I’m
familiar with it. But I don’t think you’d find anything different. At the other Hong
Kong universities, and if you look at sub-degree institutions, if you look at your two-
year colleges granting associate degrees, you’d find even more of it” (30:52). Having
worked for 20 years in Asia with English as a foreign language, I understand the
concerns, both from teachers and policy-makers. This continues to be an area within
language policy and teaching methodology that should be addressed from research
and informed debate.
Lisa M. Hunsberger, Kyushu Sangyo University

(Japan)—Interview #60
Paper discussed: Hunsberger (2020). Creating great PowerPoint and Keynote presen-
tations and teaching students to do the same. Common (Kyushu Sangyo University
Computing and Networking Center Journal), 39, 83–93.
Date of podcast publication: May 26, 2021.
Hailing from the island of Jamaica in the Caribbean, Lisa Hunsberger was interviewed
about her experiences as a language learner, traveler, and language instructor. Lisa
has been a TESOL and linguistics educator for over 15 years but is relatively early
in her career in academia in Japan, but her interview is indicative of one of the
key elements of the podcast: interviewing knowledgeable people in their field on
interesting parts of their life experiences. In an early part of the interview, Lisa
spoke about her travels to an Arawakan community in Guyana and the memories she
carries from those times: “I will never forget, there was one community that was only
accessible by boats. And the children, the school children, they would come to this
main area for school, and then they’d jump in their canoes, and paddle home. It was
one of the most amazing things I had ever seen. And just going into the communities
and recording the language was very, a very unique experience, because this was a
language that hadn’t been documented as much as Lokono had been. And so just to
even start was challenging, because one of the best ways to get speakers to speak
naturally about their language is to have them tell a story. And while they’re telling
the story, they’re saying all these different things. And then you say, “Okay, so, can
you explain to me what the story was about?”, and then they tell you the meaning of
the story in English. So, of course, they’re bilingual. And when they’re explaining
the meaning in English, you hear keywords. J—okay. This was a story about a man
who went to the forest I’m like, “Okay, how do you say’man’; in your language?
How do you say’go’ in your language? How do you say ‘forest’ in your language?”
And then if they say’went’ to the forest, and I have to say, I have to ask, “Okay. How
do you say’is going’,’went’,’will be going’”? and I get all of the variations within
one particular word, then. So, all the conjugations for verbs. So that was part of what
made it really challenging: it was having to, you know, basically, start with all of this
knowledge and then kind of, you know, analyze it down to the nitty–gritty to get all
the details” (17:19).
Lisa is also the producer of online content related to learning about English
language varieties. Her YouTube channel, “YaadPikni”, includes Lisa’s opinions
about the portrayal of Jamaican Creole in media. In her interview, she explained from
where she drew her inspiration for this channel: “Now, that part was the linguist, the
linguist in me, having watched all of these TV shows, and also knowing that there
are so many Jamaicans who don’t realize that we have— so many of us are bilin-
gual, and we don’t even realize it. We just say’English’ and’bad English’, but it’s
really English and the Jamaican language. And it’s not’bad English’. It’s a different
language entirely. It has its own grammatical system” (59:12). This is an under-
standable motivation and, as expressed by Dr Aya Matsuda, World Englishes is not a
‘politically correct’ opinion about language variety; it is an acceptance of differences
and a request for English users to think more openly and liberally about the shared
global language.
Lisa continues: “And I started making the videos because I had watched Marvel’s
Luke Cage. I am a superhero nerd. I watched Marvel’s Luke Cage. And, oh my
gosh, it was real— the Jamaican was so bad. It was cringy for every Jamaican out
there. It was so cringy. And what you find happening is that Jamaicans will hear
it and it’s cringe-worthy, but they don’t know why. I was explaining that. So, this
is ungrammatical because we don’t conjugate, we don’t mark tense in Jamaican
like this. This is how English marks tense. In Jamaican, we mark tense like this,
or this word, we don’t mark plurality like this, instead of Jamaican mark plurality
like this. So that was really where that started” (59:55). Her analysis of these points
is both linguistically correct and sociolinguistically apt: although we can say that
Jamaican Creole is similar to what is considered to be ‘Standard English’, it has its
own culturally and historically relevant background.
Lisa represents the group of researchers and linguists we are intending to showcase
through our work. She has identified an area of language performance that is often
under-represented and has developed methods of presenting it to a new audience.
Her use of non-traditional avenues of dissemination, such as her YouTube channel,
is indicative of the numerous potential routes we have available to us in the Internet
age. She is someone who is passionate about language and certainly an academic
with whom I am sure we will have plenty of contact in the future.
Conclusion
The interviews presented here may include many different topics, but they are demon-
strative of a shared opinion within the field of EIL: English should be used as a tool
for international communication for the benefit of all parties; no locational or perfor-
mance variety can ever be given a position of privilege above any others. As was noted
in the Dr. Matsuda interview, context is key: we as users of an international language
should always be considering where we are, with whom we are communicating,
for what purpose, and what we can and should be doing to make the interaction as
effective as possible.
Our intent with this podcast was very similar to the underlying principles of EIL
and ELF: to interact with as many people as possible from a range of fields and with
different backgrounds and opinions and to do so in a medium that was accessible to
as many people as we could. New media is certainly the way forward for language
research, not only in connecting with people around the world but also representing
the many ways we can present our works: it is a two-way lens for sharing information.
This project is far from over, and publications such as this, which we hope will
publicize both the positive aspects of EIL, ELF, and EMI and our podcast, are an
important part of the process. We believe that by putting a name to the face and voice
to the words, we can demystify concepts from a broad range of academic fields, make
academia livelier and engaging for all participants. Those who find themselves lost
in citations, struggling to find the right paper or the right author to further their own
work, can be given greater confidence that there are others out there just like them
and, above all, these people are willing to open up and help us understand their work
better.
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Matsuda, A., & Freidrich, P. (2011). English as an international language: A curriculum blueprint.
World Englishes, 30, 332–344.
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Seidlhofer, B. (2013). Understanding English as a Lingua Franca-Oxford Applied Linguistics.
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Shachter, J. (Host). (2021). Lisa Hunsberger [Audio Podcast]. Podbean. https://lostinthecitations.
podbean.com/e/citation-59-hunsberger-l-m-2019-creating-great-powerpoint-and-keynote-pre
sentations-and-teaching-students-to-do-the-same-common-39-80-90/.
Chapter 4
Decolonizing the Composition Classroom
Through Inclusion of Localized Global
English Varieties
Tim Hendrix
Abstract As one-size-fits-all English language variety institutional instruction is

not adequately preparing students globally for the ways they need to use English
within their own contexts (Jenkins, TESOL Quarterly 40:157–181, 2006), educators
need to consider incorporating World Englishes into their classrooms. However, a
considerable obstacle to decentralizing English from largely British and American
prestige dialects and accommodating local English varieties in the classroom has
been the standards of academic writing. The various challenges inherent in adjusting
academic writing standards are considered, followed by a discussion on how World
Englishes can benefit students. The situation of English instruction in the Sultanate of
Oman is used as a case study to show how traditional academic standards of English
instruction are not adequately preparing students for their occupational needs and
to speculate on how the inclusion of World Englishes could help. Several classroom
activities are discussed to show how a university could adjust its writing goals to
meet the contextualized needs of its students. A brief conclusion invites educators
to treat English composition not as a gatekeeper to protect academic English from
non-standard norms but as a doorway to allow Global Englishes entry to academic
writing.
Keywords Global English · EFL · Composition · World Englishes
Introduction
In decolonizing the English classroom and decentralizing the ownership of English,

one challenge that is particularly and consistently troublesome is the question of
academia’s standard of writing. Although adapting the literary canon for reading can
present students with valuable exposure to different varieties, and while academic
oral communication already has some reasonable flexibility to accept non-native
English varieties, the question of opening university writing standards to include
T. Hendrix (B)
e-mail: thendrix@squ.edu.om
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_4
50 T. Hendrix
other global varieties of English has been considerably more complicated to answer.
Even within a native-speaker’s dialect, the canon of writing standards is more rigor-
ously defined, more rigidly inflexible, and more resistant toward change than other
forms of academic communication. Outside of the native-speaking context, in coun-
tries where English is taught as a foreign language or functions as a lingua franca,
there remains a devotion in writing requirements to the “correct” forms of native-level
production, even when such production actually impedes effective communication
within English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) contexts. The complex reasons for this
reliance on non-ELF varieties within ELF settings also leave university administra-
tors and departmental leaders unable to commit to breaking the established norms of
academic written curricula. In light of current conditions, bringing global Englishes
into the composition course can be expected to be a slow process that will face
repetitive hurdles on multiple levels at the university.
But the conversation should not be difficult to start in any composition program.
Whether they are even aware of the drive to decolonize the language of the university,
English writing instructors are familiar with the tensions of teaching monocultural
writing style and mechanics to a multicultural audience. For the teacher, there exists,
on one hand, the charge to safeguard the language of the university: Among other
responsibilities, composition courses exist to unify the standardized communication
for the whole of academia, to ensure that what we research can be shared globally,
to maintain established writing styles, and to ensure that students are capable of
expressing themselves intelligibly. On the other hand, the teacher holds a set of
responsibilities toward the students: The composition course must equally serve
students who arrive to the classroom with a diverse set of linguistic backgrounds,
provide students with the tools needed to express their own voices, and meet the real-
world communicative needs of the students. These two sets of responsibilities create
several conflicting interests in the classroom space. In maintaining a native-speaker,
prestige variation standard, the course becomes a gatekeeper against students who
use non-prestige varieties. By maintaining rigidly established writing styles, the
course can limit the development of new voices and innovative language change.
Holding to a too-narrow definition of what is and is not intelligible expression, the
course also risks not meeting the quantifiable real-world needs of the students. These
conflicting interests only grow more complicated in EFL classrooms outside of what
B. Kachru (1985) defines as inner circle English communities: Kachru’s concentric
circles model places countries that use English as a first language and the primary
language for discourse across all levels of society within the centermost circle, the
“inner circle” context: places like the United Kingdom, USA, or Australia. Outside
this circle are the outer and expanding circles who use English not as the primary
language but instead, respectively, as a lingua franca or for smaller, more specific roles
within society. Because the communicative needs of English speakers in these places
are significantly different than within the inner circle communities, the requirement
of only British or American norms cannot fully meet the needs of students who
are learning English in an outer circle or expanding circle context (Jenkins, 2006),
most of whom will encounter other World English varieties much more frequently
throughout their lifetimes.
4 Decolonizing the Composition Classroom Through Inclusion … 51
These tensions can create a divided loyalty for the teacher: What am I here to serve,
the language of academia or the needs of the student? Unfortunately, the two can be
significantly misaligned. Generally, teachers’ concerns are alleviated by university
standards: As the employee, the teacher can follow the directives of the employer and
rely on the established patterns, but in a changing globalized economy, the question
remains. Is the university, particularly outside of the inner circle of native English-
speaking countries, meeting the complex linguistic needs of EFL students, especially
in regards to communication through World Englishes (WEs) to prepare them for
written English communication that is relevant to their futures?
To answer this question, we first must understand some of the challenges that stand
in the way of adjusting the standards of writing curricula. This task requires some
exploration of the multiple tiers of complexity that create resistance in academic
writing styles toward change or adaptation even when they do not fully serve the
needs of the students. Then, we will examine how knowledge of WEs functions as a
communicative competency that is needed for today’s students, justifying the role of
WEs in the composition classroom. Afterwards, using my own teaching context as a
case study, I will analyze the needs for university students to develop competency in
WEs in the Sultanate of Oman, a borderline outer circle/expanding circle country to
determine what WEs exposure can be beneficial. Finally, I will outline a few practical
activities that can introduce WE writing tasks into university-level EFL composition
courses in ways that can prepare students to understand and manage the multiple
English varieties they can be expected to encounter, help students to see English as
a language of many varieties and that shared written conventions do not constitute a
single correct way to use English, and give students the skills they need to analyze
their own language output as a distinct variety of English.
Inherent Challenges to Moving Away from Established

Writing Styles
Educators face a difficult task when making even minor adjustments to shared writing
standards. Proposing changes to the established codes of academic writing is under-
standably a complex process. One of the main functions of collegiate writing is to
provide the student with prestige variation language, the code of the academic elite, a
passcard into the discourse of a higher class of researchers. The ideal is to provide all
students, regardless of ethnicity, social class, gender, and nationality the same access
to the language of academia. But, as can be expected in any linguistic monoculture,
the result is that a single variety of the language is heightened to a place of power
at the expense of other varieties, a problematic condition of prestige language use
that has been exploited as a tool of colonization. Phillipson’s (1992) illustration of
how English as a language has displaced other languages worldwide demonstrates
how educational settings have been especially instrumental in this work; on a smaller
scale, though no less global, the same happens within varieties of English. Speakers
52 T. Hendrix
who have had a lifetime of closer access to the language of academia are able to adapt
more easily and pass by the gatekeepers while speakers of other varieties face more
difficulty adapting their language enough to achieve this standard, if they are able to
reach it at all during their studies. Not only is the ideal of equal access to scholarly
language not attained, it actively centralizes the interests of a specific group while
denying entry to others. Wakkad (2020) describes how even being a representative
of academia does not protect a speaker of a non-standard variety from language-
based criticism, as evidenced by how graduate teaching assistants regularly have
their authority questioned by students, due to their differences in English usage.
The impulse toward established academic standard communication is so strong that
even students who use language more closely aligned with it feel they have higher
status than instructors who are perceived to be further from it. Clearly, the problem
is larger than simply what goes on in the classroom and illustrates broader problems
of attitudes toward linguistic variation.
As such, the university plays a major role in ongoing linguistic imperialism. The
language of prestige is protected, valued, and exalted; the language of the outsider
is disrespected, treated as uneducated, and even ridiculed (Wetzl, 2013). The need
for adapting and expanding what is acceptable in university written language—and
beyond that, what is acceptable in international publication guidelines—exists in
order to more closely reach the ideal of an academic language for all (Esseili et al.,
2009).
As we consider the inclusion of WEs into the canon of university language, we can
use as an example the resistance toward language change in American universities
even in the face of increased enrollment of minority language varieties, as the need
for all university students to interact with these varieties became more clear and
the need to read and understand the literature of other voices became increasingly
evident to English educators.
Shaughnessy (1976), writing in the recently-desegregated American university of
the 1970s, described the tension that composition instructors were feeling in terms of
a teacher’s developmental stages. She pointed out that the desire to “guard the tower”
of academic language is a position of self-preservation on the part of the teacher, one
that appeases the university at large and could keep the teacher herself from facing
any of the resistance toward change but that ultimately works to keep the voices of
outsiders from reaching the upper thresholds of discourse. She concludes that the
fully developed composition teacher is one who recognizes that the failing grades of
the students often only reflect the teacher’s ignorance of the students, their semantics,
and their language. The inability on the teacher’s part to recognize the value of the
language that the students bring to their compositions is a significant limit to linguistic
innovation and to the potential for academic writing to change. Unfortunately, in
current standing, that is both the point and the problem of composition courses,
leading both student and teacher to conclude, as Lovejoy (2003) describes, that there
is only one correct way to write at the university. Without teacher education on
linguistic variation, the cycle of linguistic imperialism continues unchecked. The
problem is cyclical: The academic forum simply cannot allow space for linguistic
innovations of the students because the language comes from the students, not from
the academic forum.
Recognizing the grammatical complexities of another variety of English, the
teacher sees that the task is not to “correct” the students’ language but more often
to help them craft their arguments, to fine tune their logic, to sharpen their word
choice—more closely resembling the focus of the work that teachers do with the pres-
tige variety writers. However, noting the grammatical differences and accepting them
as academic writing are two different tasks. As very few composition teachers receive
advanced education in linguistics to be able to identify the grammatical choices of
another variety of English, beginning teachers have little choice but to hold to what
they have been taught about grammar and style—which is most likely in line with
the shared conclusion that there is only one correct way to write. Beyond the compo-
sition courses, there is still another obstacle to including WEs to the curriculum:
Helping the rest of the faculty at a university to be able to work with other varieties
in standard use. How much more grief will composition teachers face from other
departments for allowing more “broken” English to pass through the gate? How is
a nuanced linguistics discussion, already lacking in English teacher education, to be
transmitted across all disciplines as it is newly introduced to English courses? These
are questions that will require a great deal of consideration.
Outside of the inner circle context, the impetus on universities to teach EFL
courses using professional British, American, or Australian English as the standard
for written communication comes from a few directions. First, there is a need for outer
circle universities to prepare their students for success within the inner circle univer-
sities; adhering to language standards of inner circle universities simply provides
students with more educational opportunities. Secondly, because of international
publishing requirements, students are taught to write according to these standards
in order to provide them with the ability to publish international research later in
their professional careers. Thirdly, language attitudes persist even among teachers
and students that using language without markers of their own English variety (such
as accents, codeswitching, and semantic differences) is a more correct version of
English production. Etus and Schultze (2014) illustrate the issue with a focus group
conversation with student teachers in Istanbul: While there is perceived benefit in
studying multiple models of global English, decentralizing from the language used
in inner circle countries is not considered a possibility because the ownership of
standardization of the language is believed to rest with the so-called native-speakers.
Given challenges such as these, university leaders in many EFL settings are happier
to settle within a monolithic English status quo; too much change has to happen
across too many settings to justify developing the students’ abilities in non-inner
circle English usage.
At least part of the problem stems from what has become the traditional English
classroom. Many English programs find themselves with the designation to serve
internal university standards of communication rather than looking outward to
writing that students will more likely encounter or will be more likely to produce.
Owing to prescriptive language goals about what can be considered acceptable
academic writing and to a dependence on the established status quo of “correct”
54 T. Hendrix
language use, English programs have become stagnant in their ability to prepare
students for success outside of the native-speaking academic publishing arena, which
is a direction that the majority of English students, both inner circle and beyond, will
not go. Why is it that English programs have to be the one to serve the language needs
of other academic disciplines? How would our course objectives change if English
educators had the freedom, as teachers from other disciplines do, to adapt our goals
to the needs of the majority of our students?
Changing the status quo requires a substantial adjustment in how we use and
teach language and has the potential to create challenges at every level of academic
interaction: student, instructor, department, and university administration. Changing
the approach to the English classroom is not an easy step at any one of those levels.
It will require a seismic cultural shift in academia toward our understanding of
language standards, language acquisition, language attitudes, and even professional
development.
This shift in our approach to language can as well open the discussion to other
changes to our understanding of academic discourse, allowing composition programs
to broaden the scope of academic writing by responding more accurately to the needs
of the students. With this mindset, English educators could build their classrooms not
only around more relevant language choices but also around more relevant writing
formats that the students will encounter or produce in their own contexts.
World Englishes as a Communicative Competence
However, regardless of real or perceived resistance, helping students to navigate WEs

can provide tangible benefits to both universities and students. In fact, considering
the globalization of the workforce of the past two decades, providing students with
the tools to communicate across a wide range of English varieties should be seen as
one of the essential tasks of university education.
Most obviously, there is the restoration of the validity of people’s language
choices. In regions where people were subjected to linguistic colonization, emphasis
on global varieties of English can aid speakers and writers in overcoming language
attitudes of shame and inferiority that were actively enforced over them and that
have been allowed to continue through prescriptive models of teaching language arts.
Canagarajah’s (2006) use of minority scholars’ published works in his composition
courses to help multilingual students see the academic potential of their own language
choices (p. 603) is a great example of this. Validating and developing people’s own
voices is, again, one of the primary goals of composition courses, and restoring
people’s confidence in their own accents and sociolinguistic rules is essential to that
goal. The awareness to address the English classroom’s role in colonial subjugation
has been slowly growing in composition studies; even Peter Elbow, a central figure in
composition studies, writing with Reanae McNeal after his retirement from teaching,
decried his own lack of awareness and action in reframing how he taught English
composition (2017). The responsibility of the composition teacher can be reshaped
into a role of helping students build new trackways for their language, and not to
function as the old guard of an oppressive system. The composition classroom is
where we as writing teachers decide whether to support systemic cultural bias or to
work to help people recover from it.
But teaching WEs does not function only to alleviate the problems of the past. It
is helpful to note, too, that making space for global varieties in academic discourse is
not only for the benefit of non-native variety speakers and writers. Encountering and
learning the styles of other varieties helps to develop creativity, linguistic innova-
tions, and global opportunities (Huddart, 2014; Kachru and Nelson, 2011; Jenkins,
2006), and these benefits apply to all students who learn them. Conclusions reached
by Horner et al. (2011) on how limiting scholastic writing to monolinguistic English
limits our own access to valuable expertise could feasibly be extended to prove the
same about varieties within English. By limiting the ability of other varieties to
publish research, we are at worst suppressing research and at the very least slowing
down the sharing of ideas. Furthermore, exposure to different varieties appears to help
students to have more positive attitudes toward other language varieties (Moussu,
2010; Wetzl, 2013) and could feasibly help foster more positive cross-cultural inter-
actions in the students’ futures, helping students to dissociate individual language
users from biased stereotypes.
Decolonizing the language of the English classroom—including the formidable
composition classroom—is not only an act of social justice; it is a practical, even util-
itarian response to the ever-changing needs of the students. Using native-level profi-
ciency as the standard for English language learning is no longer the most accurate
reflection of how students in EFL courses will need to use the language (Rajagopalan,
2004). Because of English’s place as a global language, today’s students need to
have the Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) to encounter, engage with,
respect, and communicate within a revolving set of sociolinguistic mores, language
standards, and semantic cues, which requires a restructuring of how English is to
be taught (Alptekin, 2002). In an investigation of international teachers, Young and
Sachdev (2010) find that while ICC plays a highly relevant role in both teaching and
learning English, classrooms offer little or inconsistent structural support for students
to develop this highly functional skill. Of course, the addition of a focus on ICC need
not turn our classrooms into a Theoretical Linguistics laboratory; while it would be
unrealistic for students and teachers to be expected to know the full sets of rules for
every variety of global English, they do need to have a set of soft skills strategies
for how to hear, read, and appropriately respond to a new variety, or as Canagarajah
and Said (2010) recommend for all English speakers in America, at least have the
receptive skills to conduct business with outsourced companies. Students need the
professional skills to exchange information with a wide range of multicultural audi-
ences who will almost certainly use forms of English that the students may not have
encountered.
To keep up with real-world student needs, universities will need to broaden the
scope of what is acceptable within academic discourse, especially in regards to
students who are learning English as a second or foreign language. We can contrast
EFL learner long-term needs for academic publication standard English against their
56 T. Hendrix
other daily professional needs in the language to develop a more clear picture of
how the classroom can better support the learners. When the ELF-context classroom
produces students who are no more able to function in their workplaces than they are
able to produce an academic publication, should we not adjust the focus to a more
realistic, attainable, and productive goal?
Recognizing and justifying WEs’ place in the classroom as communicative
competence can as well begin to give credence to increased linguistic innovation
within the canon of academic writing. In the same way that resistance to non-standard
writing styles is cyclical, its eventual acceptance can also build on itself—we learn
to understand and respect each other’s ways of writing and that leads us to be able to
allow more flexibility in the writing that we contribute in institutional and professional
settings.
EFL in Oman: Assessing the WEs Needs of Students

in an Outer Circle Context
To understand the value of WEs study in an EFL setting, we can look more closely
at the study of English in an outer circle community where the needs of the students
extend beyond the scope of the academic standard variety. Following McKay’s (2002)
directive that English teachers begin to think globally about how English is used but
act locally, educators should be prepared to teach global Englishes by focusing on
the varieties that exist within their own contexts. As a case study, I am using my
teaching context at Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman.
Located in the Arab Gulf region, the Sultanate of Oman rests outside of the inner
circle of English usage. English is used here as a lingua franca among a wide range
of domestic and foreign languages that exist within the country. English speakers are
accommodated in most situations: Governmental processes and most commerce is
conducted in English and Arabic, and an English speaker living in the capital city
of Muscat rarely has to rely on Arabic to function. Al Baluchi (2001) explains that
English, as the primary shared global language, has been adopted by Omani officials
as an acceptable venue for “all economic, technological, vocational, educational,
and communicative functions” (p. 5). As a result, since the 1970s, English has been
Oman’s only foreign official language (Al-Issa & Al-Bulushi, 2012), and Oman has
invested heavily in its English scholarship, requiring twelve years of English study
as part of Omani education (Al-Mahrooqi, 2012) although many students complete
their secondary education with significant deficiencies in their ability to use English
successfully in postsecondary settings (Al-Issa, 2011; Sergon, 2011).
Omani students attending Sultan Qaboos University, the country’s premiere
university, are required to learn English, and the classes of most majors are conducted
in English (Sergon, 2011). If they are not already fluent in the language on admis-
sion to the university, they can take up to 2 years of intensive English studies, which
are conducted with a strong focus on British and American standards of production
in their listening, speaking, and writing courses. As they interact with their inten-
sive English studies teachers from different parts of the world, students encounter
differences between American and British varieties as well as some varieties through
the spoken and written language of their non-western instructors, though an explicit
focus on these differences is not part of the curriculum for most courses.
It is necessary to mention that exposure to English that comes from non-English
speaking countries is recommended by the National English Language Plan/Policy
(NELP) to be included in English teaching materials in order to develop students’
sociolinguistic competence, although some discrepancies exist between this recom-
mendation and the materials produced for classroom use (Al-Issa, 2005). That the
students will encounter a wide range of Englishes is adequately identified, but
teaching materials continue to reflect a primarily British-and-American standard
of language use. Of course, the discrepancy between theory and practice of teaching
global Englishes is not unique to Oman. Researchers have identified and described
the need for WEs education, but translating that need to the classroom has not yet
happened in many places: B. Kachru (1992, cited in Kamhi-Stein, 2014) describes a
shift away from inner-circle varieties as the central standard of English, but that shift
has been largely limited to theoretical scholarship and has not generally extended to
classroom practices (Jenkins, 2006, cited in Kamhi-Stein, 2014). Kamhi-Stein (2014)
suggests that the discrepancy is the result of teacher education, as even teachers in the
expanding circle contexts are educated under British and American standards—again
reflecting the cyclical nature of the problem.
Course materials for in-house textbooks at SQU’s intensive English program,
written by teachers from over 50 countries, offer some natural exposure to minor
differences among additional language varieties, and many of the students induc-
tively learn some broad generalizations on how to use their language in different
contexts. Reading courses, particularly for advanced-level humanities students, cover
diverse texts, including multiple Indian and Harlem Renaissance authors, so students
gain some exposure to some differences of language variation. Apart from these
minor interactions, though, students are largely taught to follow British and American
English standards.
The focus on British and American English produces challenges for Omani
English speakers. Al-Issa (2005) identifies markers of colonialist ideologies inherent
in the structure of language teaching pedagogy in the country, particularly in regard
to the way that western culture is transmitted through standing English teaching
materials and imported media. Al-Issa et al. (2017) further question the apparatus of
using IELTS test band 6 as a requirement for Omani English speakers to be hired at
SQU as teachers, raising the issue of IELTS testing becoming a cultural bias against
Omani teachers reaching the Omani classroom (Al-Issa et al., 2016). Furthermore,
although the students are able to complete their studies in English, English production
in the Omani workforce is still underperforming. Omani employees have difficulties
in negotiating communicative skills required for their jobs, especially in regards to
interacting with people from different sociocultural backgrounds (Al-Mahrooqi &
Denman, 2016). While these problems stem from many different sources and will
58 T. Hendrix
not be overcome by the introduction of global Englishes to the university curriculum,

including WEs to the classroom may help to alleviate some of them.
University students in Oman are prime candidates for innovative study of WEs in
their classes, due to the global reach of the country and the population demographics.
Domestically, there is a high population of expatriate workers from around the world
with higher percentages of South and Southeast Asians; in fact, although the numbers
have been changing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, expatriate workers continue to
make up 38.8% of the population (Nair, 2021), and even after a large reduction in
the number of Indian residents in Oman in 2020, Indians alone continued to account
for more than 10% of the total expatriate population (The Economic Times, 2020).
Oman’s long history with Tanzania continues to promote travel and trade between
Oman and east Africa, particularly due to familial relations that now connect the two
regions (Masebo, 2016). Oman’s recent expansion of its tourism industry has also
heightened its engagement with global Englishes (Times News Service, 2019). From
construction worksites to university teaching posts, from holiday travel to familial
relationships, Omanis can expect to encounter multiple varieties of global English
regularly and must be equipped to interact meaningfully within those structures.
Bringing a broader exposure to WEs to the Omani classroom should be consis-
tent with the English varieties they can expect to encounter. While there exists a
reasonable academic need for American and British English, the greater percentage
of students will also need interaction with South Asian Englishes, especially Indian
English; Southeast Asian Englishes, especially Philippine English; and East African
Englishes. Learning to communicate well across these varieties can strengthen the
professional opportunities of Omani students and increase productivity within the
Omani workforce as well as foster increased ease in general cross-cultural interac-
tions. These English varieties should be explored further through English literature
and writing in order to meet the demands of English use in Oman.
Introducing WE Writing Tasks to Students Who Are

Struggling to Manage a Single Variety
Unfortunately, due to the inherent challenges to changing established language

standards described earlier, teachers are often underprepared for bringing global
Englishes to the classroom. Working with EFL students, one can anticipate some
common questions that may arise among teachers:
How am I supposed to teach my students to manage multiple dialectical differences when they
already struggle to write in a single variety correctly? Won’t teaching them about different
varieties only validate the grammatical mistakes they are already making?
Examining the grammatical choices that most of the students make—especially

those caused by interference from their native Arabic—can help Omani students in
a number of ways. Not only do they begin to define for themselves the differences
that mark Arab Gulf English but they also are able to see the differences in patterns
between their language and the British and American grammatical structures. Devel-
oping metalinguistic strategies only strengthens the students’ ability to analyze their
own output. Their ability to identify the difference can help them in using British and
American standards within the necessary contexts while continuing to develop their
own patterns, semantics, and rules—their own voice—outside of those contexts; in
fact, Wetzl (2013) reports that students with more experiences with language vari-
eties have a stronger understanding of how negotiation of language varieties works,
having a more developed understanding of when to use “proper English” in the
correct contexts than students with less experience. The goal of negotiating language
varieties across different contexts can be achieved with the right targeted practices.
Furthermore, Canagaraja (2007) describes how our concerns about validating gram-
matical errors stem from an incomplete understanding of how learners acquire the
language. Studying varieties of English will not encourage them to make grammatical
errors but will enhance their understanding of what the language can do.
It is important to note that examining the linguistic elements, while it can be
beneficial to the study of American or British writing styles, should not solely serve
the interests of the language of the status quo. Bringing global varieties of English to
class ultimately may be able to produce students who are better equipped to function
within prescriptive study of English, but we introduce these varieties to the classroom
in order to expand our access to those varieties, to increase the students’ ability to
interact with varieties of English different to their own, to validate their role within
academia, to encourage student innovation in using their own language to expand
the canon of English as a global language (Huddart, 2014).
Canagarajah (2006) lists the different contexts where teachers feel comfortable
allowing WEs into the classroom, such as creative writing, writing dialogue, informal
speaking, home or local communication, and oral communication. It is crucial that
writing activities we develop do not simply fall back into the traditional categories
of what is comfortable to allow inside the writing class. If we are to transform
the classroom, we need to move beyond what is familiar. What would the English
classroom look like if educators theoretically wiped the slate, studied the global
market, and trained students for success in English’s nuanced and multi-faceted
profile? Allowing space for WEs would be an essential change, but there would
likely be considerable changes to the kinds of assignments students would complete.
One could expect more task-based classrooms, where the activities focus less on
perfect re-creation of standardized British and American norms and more on essential
occupational functions that the students would have to perform when they leave the
classroom. Creating a teacher education system that starts with the question “What
is English?” according to its place as a global language will also help to provide the
essential linguistic training to help the next generation of teachers to have a wider
view on what can be considered professional English composition work.
The following activities while structured to build metalinguistic analysis and
communicative competence are as well meant to create space for WEs in the act
of writing in formal settings. These activities are also designed to help students
encounter different forms of English, sharpen student abilities in thinking about
60 T. Hendrix
language, foster linguistic innovation, and reframe language attitudes toward vari-
eties, but they as well function to give credence to the linguistic innovations that exist
within the students’ language. As we sharpen student understanding of the differ-
ences in varieties and of their own grammars, we invite them to create for themselves
the space for their voices, to define for themselves what their English usage can be
within their own communities; these are academic pursuits, and this is academic
writing. We remind ourselves that if what we are teaching them is not helping them
use English successfully within the contexts of their professional lives, then we need
to adjust what we are teaching. To re-think what the English classroom is, we need to
stop holding our ideal of language use as the goal and instead focus on the real-world
needs of the students.
Recasting Across Varieties
In dealing with ELF communication, especially in the Omani tourism and hospitality
industries, Omani students should be expected to be able to communicate effectively
and professionally across multiple world varieties of English. Their ability to under-
stand and accommodate speakers of other varieties needs to be developed in both their
oral and written communication. Building on recasting strategies that they already
learn as part of their English intensive studies, students can be taught to rephrase
messages within different grammatical frameworks.
An example of this would be a three-part activity. First, the students are asked to
compose an email, attempting to fulfill a specific task that can be aligned with their
specific major (Engineering students, for example, could write a set of instructions
while Tourism students can write instructions on how to check in at a hotel). After
they have prepared their emails, they can be presented with a brief set of three to
five grammatical features of a specific English variety. Finally, they can review their
own writing, identify appropriate places that could be rephrased to match the target
grammar, and revise their compositions to reach their target audience.
This kind of assignment could be tailored to the course and the needs of the
students. Students could approach news writing, business and professional writing,
even technical writing within the same framework. The goal does not necessarily
have to be accurate production of the forms they encounter in an English variety,
but practicing writing those forms can help them to develop long-term comprehen-
sion experiences that will make it easier for them to interact with those varieties
in their futures, keeping closer in line with Kubota’s (2001) vision for an English
classroom that encourages students to interact with linguistic structures outside of
what is familiar to them while rejecting discriminatory language attitudes. Working
across different varieties is a matter of both comprehension and production (Hazen,
2001), and in many contexts, understanding without speaking or writing the variety
is sufficient for interaction. Within each local situation, teachers and administrators
need to assess whether students will need to extend beyond receptively understanding
a variety into being able to produce it.
Bidialectal Writing
To heighten students’ awareness that much of their English production is negotiation

among varieties, that their language production is not wrong if it retains intelligible
meaningfulness, and that production of academic English is not the standard for all
English communication but simply another variety that is bound to its necessary
context, the following activity could be a helpful common classroom practice with
each writing assignment throughout a semester.
As students are learning about the writing process, part of their drafting can include
writing a full draft of an assignment in their variety. This draft can be checked by
the teacher, who does not mark it for grammatical deviation from the academic
standard but only brings the students’ attention to areas where the meaning is lost.
A subsequent draft of the composition can later be written for the explicit purpose
of fitting into the native-like academic standard, and the main focus of the teacher’s
feedback will be on how well the students are performing within that variety. In
this assignment, they are learning how to create meaningful output within their own
language variety and learning how to translate across dialects for tasks where it will
be necessary. Baumgardner (1987) used a similar activity, having Pakistani students
“translate” inner circle texts for Pakistani readers and Pakistani texts for an inner
circle audience.
The twofold goal of this practice is that students who will continue in their studies
toward research writing and other native-like requirements will be able to function in
those contexts and will develop a fine-tuned writing style within their own culture’s
use of English. Students outside of the inner circle countries should not be left
without the tools to succeed at universities where native-like proficiency will be
required. However, a practice like this should also help them to differentiate between
the varieties that they use and to recognize that their meaningful language production
is not wrong or incorrect when it functions well for ELF tasks.
Of course, a natural barrier to this kind of practice remains the limitations of the
teacher’s knowledge about the students’ variety, which normally results in the teacher
marking most student deviations from standard writing as errors. Changing writing
rubrics to focus on meaningful output rather than cut-and-dry prescribed grammat-
ical forms can present a difficult challenge for composition programs. In this regard,
native-speakers from inner circle English communities may be at a genuine disad-
vantage for assessing meaningful language output within an ELF context. Producing
EFL teachers out of these communities who are capable of guiding students through
contextualized ELF usage is part of a larger conversation about how teacher educa-
tion requirements will need to adapt toward decolonization. For additional guidance
on focusing on intelligible meaningful output, Kachru and Nelson (2011) provide a
helpful discussion untangling the definition of “intelligible” output without getting
lost in ambiguities.
62 T. Hendrix
Storytelling
Identifying sociolinguistic distinctions of a language variety can be a bit more

nuanced than grammatical study. Welcoming cultural practices, and specifically
storytelling, to the classroom is a helpful way to open the discussion to pragmatic,
sociolinguistic, and cultural norms (McNeal & Elbow, 2017). While these cultural
practices can vary widely from one context to the next, within an Omani frame-
work and within any EFL setting that has a strong oral tradition, the inclusion of
storytelling could help to breach those topics.
Within academia, storytelling is a familiar construct in even the most prescrip-
tive classroom settings as the narrative essay. In those settings, often the established
narrative elements are presented to the students who then have to rise to the expecta-
tions of what has been done before them. Cultures rich in oral traditions are able to
work safely outside of that model, and storytelling allows the learners to bring their
own writing formats to academic discourse or allows the teacher to present other
modes of writing. Traditionally oral cultures should not be expected to adapt their
communication styles to the models of western thought as a measure of their ability to
use English effectively. In these contexts, teachers and administrators should heavily
consider whether the use of the formal essay is even the best way to prepare students
for their successful use of English in their community.
Using storytelling in the classroom, the students are able to write their stories
following their own cultural standards for narrative structures instead of adopting a
prescribed method of writing, which can later be used for classroom analysis and
discussion. Instead of teaching essay writing, the teacher can use storytelling to help
students navigate traditionally “non-academic” writing structures, such as comics,
or even focus on the use of writing as a preparation tool for oral storytelling. In
classroom discussions of these student writings, students are able to start working to
define what it means to be an Omani storyteller writing in English from the ground-
level language choices that made all the way up to the modes of storytelling that
are used, developing the future of their own literary genres from the language and
identity that they already have cultured within their oral tradition.
The main point of bringing storytelling and other relevant cultural practices into
the writing classroom is to foster what Kachru and Nelson (2011) describe as contex-
tual nativization: bringing the idioms, proverbs, rhetorical devices, and speech styles
from their daily language use into their English writing. To use storytelling to shed
light on the sociolinguistic rules within the students’ English variety, topics that
explore familial and social interactions, marriage, commercial and occupational
traditions, or other nuanced language interactions can produce generous discussion
points.
After the students have produced some of their own written storytelling and have
identified and discussed some of the features of their variety, a helpful follow-up
exercise would be to read and search for similar features in the storytelling of another
target language variety. This practice could help students to develop reading strategies
for approaching each new variety.
Defining Omani English
As Shaughnessy (1976) pointed out, one of the major challenges in accepting varia-
tional differences is the fact that teachers do not know the linguistic, sociolinguistic,
cultural, and semantic complexities that the student speakers bring to class. To address
this issue while at the same time inviting students to metacognitive processing of
their language production, the students can be asked to define the features of Omani
English. Per Huddart (2014, 32–51), this exercise seeks to help students explore
their own cultural translation, examining the ways that Omani language and culture
is expanding the English language.
With a class discussion about linguistic patterns (such as the common verb form “is
+ infinitive verb”), codeswitching (e.g., use of ‫“[ َﻳ ْﻌ ِﻨﻲ‬yani”] and other Arabic words
and phrases in English conversation), and sociolinguistics (cultural expectations that
remain the same across English and Arabic), students can choose a feature to define,
writing to explain the way that the language choices they make reflect Omani culture
and how Omani culture is reflected in the language they use.
An assignment like this would be easier for advanced EFL learners, and it would
be expected that it would be written without a native-like production requirement.
With further development, essays like these could prove invaluable to the postcolonial
classroom: the students are defining their language features themselves, the teacher
is able to gain insight on the complexities of student language, and the students
are working toward academic discussion of the development of their own English
variety. As they define their own linguistic innovations, the students are invited to
add to the discussion of what makes an Omani English and are given the basic tools
to begin to lead the academic conversation on their language.
Composition as a WEs Doorway
English language teaching has historically been used as a systematic tool of colo-
nization. To carry on traditions simply because they are well-established results in
the continuation of colonizing behavior, whether it is consciously or unconsciously
done by the teacher. As English teaching professionals, we carry a heavy respon-
sibility to ensure that we are not blindly carrying out the work of colonization; we
have to share the ownership of this global language with people who have and who
are developing it; we have to ensure that what our students are learning serves them
and the contexts where they will use it.
Composition courses offer a unique opportunity for students to develop a nuanced
understanding of how to navigate multiple varieties of English. Because of the
increased analytical focus on written communication, it is in writing courses where
students can practice a closer study of grammatical differences among varieties and
64 T. Hendrix
where they will likely develop a long-term understanding of how other varieties func-
tion. What is more, composition courses have functioned more strongly as a gate-
keeper that has prohibited EFL students from the academic discourse. Bringing WEs
to the classroom can help our writing courses function as a doorway: both opening
the way for students to explore the wide range of global varieties and opening the
academic writing standard for native-speakers of other varieties.
While work is already being done to bring global English to students through liter-
ature, we as educators must not neglect the importance of reimagining the composi-
tion classroom, of moving the old boundary stones to create new traditions within the
scope of academic writing. Although the reading of world literature offers significant
exposure to different varieties of English, learning to interact with writing skills may
actually prove more useful in preparing students for effective listening, speaking,
reading, and writing across a wide range of English varieties. In composition, the
students are able to analyze the grammatical and syntactical differences more closely,
so the learning experiences have potential to be more engaging and to offer more
long-term benefits than reading can.
The literature classroom is often where language varieties are able to be humanized
and the work of understanding other people is largely addressed (Collie & Slater,
1987), but it is composition courses that have the ability to make the most significant
changes to academic discourse. It is in composition where we decide what language
choices are and are not allowed. The students get to see in these courses what is
possible, and even their minor interactions with their writing teachers suggest to
them what is and is not allowed in their English production.
Decolonizing the English classroom is an appropriate way to extend the ownership
of English to the global speakers who use it in their own communities according to
their own rules, to decentralize the authority of the language from the inner circle
countries who have become its minority users. It is a practical way to meet the needs
of today’s students, especially those in EFL settings, and it is a useful approach to
inviting natural linguistic innovation and change to standard academic writing styles.
As much of a challenge as it will be to adjust our own expectations within the scope
of writing at the university, let us not neglect the work of incorporating WEs to our
students’ composition education.
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Chapter 5
Lexical Bundles of Stance in Upper-Level
Argumentative Literary Essays
and Expert-Level Literary Criticism
Articles: A Comparative Dispersion
Study
William Michael Lake and I-Hsien Lee
Abstract Preferential treatment for Inner Circle academic discourse communities’

written conventions continues to pose a challenge for Outer and Expanding Circle
English-using researchers. While data-driven writing materials for hard and social
sciences have made publishing in recognized journals increasingly attainable for
a more diverse group of international scholars, less progress in this area has been
made for humanities writing. To address this gap, the present study analyzes the use of
lexical bundles associated with the expression of stance in upper-level undergraduate
literature papers and articles from renowned Inner Circle literary criticism journals.
The results revealed that student writing tended to use words such as I less and fact
more often than did experts. However, Inner Circle journal articles consistently used
a set of stance bundles absent from student writing, including critique of the, I argue
that, and through the lens of . The paper concludes with a discussion of these findings
in light of advancements in World Englishes perspectives as a lens through which
to adapt and transform academic discourse communities’ concepts of “acceptable”
writing.
Keywords Lexical bundles · Stance · Argumentative literary essay · Literary

criticism · Inner and Outer Circle Englishes
Introduction
Some studies have approached the question of teaching students to write publishable
literary criticism papers. For example, work on topoi (Fahnestock & Secor, 1991;
Wilder, 2012) describes the kinds of rhetorical strategies expressed in published
W. M. Lake (B)
Wayne State College, Wayne, USA
e-mail: admin@wmichaellake.net
I. Lee
Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA
e-mail: ilee11@gsu.edu
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_5
68 W. M. Lake and I. Lee
literary criticism articles (hereafter LCAs). Additionally, MacDonald (1994) points

out that one feature in literary criticism writing (hereafter “LCW) that separates it
from other disciplines lies in the kinds of nouns that constitute sentence subjects. To
illustrate, an LCA will have more sentence subject nouns that come in the form
of people and places when describing circumstances in a novel, whereas other
disciplines may use phenomena that include statistical tests as subject nouns.
Knowledge on the kinds of formulaic sequences used in setting up arguments
has improved the teachability of writing for scientific fields (Cortes, 2013; Kanok-
silapatham, 2007). In light of the need to continue publishing in English and other
languages for scholars around the globe (Kachru and Nelson, 2006; Belcher, 2007),
the present study is an analysis of how opinion is expressed in student and expert Inner
Circle LCW. Taking into account prior knowledge of the norms preferred in academic
discourse communities (Duff, 2010), this knowledge may boost our understanding of
where else to bridge the gap of access to participation in Inner Circle academic literary
criticism discourse communities. To avoid prescriptivist pitfalls, we draw upon some
literature from World Englishes research in order to base attainable recommenda-
tions that promote greater access to participation in scholarly conversations to users
of English from around the world.
Research Questions
1. What lexical bundles from expert literary criticism appear in upper-level

university English argumentative papers?
2. What do differences in lexical bundles used in both text genres reveal about
strategies to teach expert-level writing to undergraduate English majors?
Literature Review
Literary Criticism Writing
Many human-focused academic disciplines, such as psychology, favor an approach

to chart generalizable laws which could explain mental and social experiences (Miles
et al., 2014). Conversely, Kusch (2016) proposes that the field of literature “offers
us the human life in total—not reduced—with its inconsistent logic, morality, and
identity on full display”. Nonetheless, Viera Echevarría (2014) presents a matter-of-
fact description of clear goals which LCW seeks to accomplish:
En literatura [...] el desarrollo se construye como el espacio donde se discute el análisis de la
obra o proceso social y se busca reafirmar la tesis, usualmente mediante la presentación de
ejemplos del texto literario analizado o mediante la presentación de citas de críticos literarios
reconocidos.
5 Lexical Bundles of Stance in Upper-Level Argumentative Literary … 69
[In literature, the development [of an argument] is constructed as the space in which one
discusses the analysis of the text or social process and aims to defend an argument, usually
via the presentation of examples from the literary text analyzed or via the presentation of
quotes from renowned literary critics] (323, translation ours).
Continuing with Viera Echevarría’s (2014) recommendations for further study of

the process of producing target-like LCW, in the present section we will discuss
past findings in LCW, some present challenges for academic writers outlined in
the literature on World Englishes, and how applied linguistics research may stand a
chance at overcoming challenges presented by research on teaching LCW and World
Englishes.
Traditional approaches to LCW have emphasized an approach of opening up
socio-historical discussions on a novel based on the genre into which a scholar clas-
sifies it (Rosmarin, 1985). For example, the “incendiary novel” has been defined as
one “seditious” (Shapiro, 2004) to established societal orders. Keeping that defini-
tion in mind, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, when classified as an
incendiary novel which criticized the horrendous institution of chattel slavery (Gill,
1996), can be discussed as transmitting ideas that those in power saw as “seditious”
to the coeval 19th-century U.S. American power structures.
Recently, however, literary studies have come to favor more interdisciplinary
approaches toward discussing social problems (Tötösy de Zepetnek, 2007). One such
example comes in the form of this abstract from an article published by Multi-Ethnic
Literature of the United States (MELUS).
Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento: A Novel (2002) dramatizes the functions
of travel and tourism for members of the Mexican and Chicana/o diaspora, particularly for
second-generation Chicana protagonist and narrator, Lala Reyes. [...] Drawing from relevant
strands in Chicana/o Studies, Indigenous Studies, Travel/Tourism Theory, Diaspora Studies,
Postcolonial Theory, and Human Geography, I argue that Lala Reyes contends with multiple
monolithic, colonially rooted views of what it means to be Mexican, US American, and
Chicana, and that she ultimately forges a sense of self that refuses cultural binaries. (Szeghi,
2014, 162)
In the abstract above, one sees an argument founded on the discipline of human
geography, in addition to other theoretical approaches. Nonetheless, despite knowl-
edge of approaches toward LCW, to the authors’ knowledge, few studies have taken
linguistic perspectives toward LCW. Notable exceptions to this tendency include
Wilder’s (2012) taxonomy (adapted from Fahnestock & Secor, 1991) of commu-
nicative purposes carried out in LCW. Wilder (2012) encourages LCW instructors to
teach the building blocks of literary papers that instructors will deem to be of high
quality, rather than a more traditional approach that centers on knowledge of genres
and terms (Blackwell & Larson, 2007).
Another study that outlined linguistic features present in LCW is that of
MacDonald (1994), who created a classification system for grammatical subjects
used in scholarly writing. She found that LCW tends to have more sentence subjects
that refer to observable persons and places. On the other hand, scientific articles
present research-centered entities, including statistical tests and past scholars, as the
agents of sentences to a greater extent. Additionally, it has been found that LCW
may contain single phrases such as “a close reading,” which are considered analo-
gous to the methods section in quantitative research articles (Thieme, 2017). Footnote
conventions involving the ways in which authors are promoted have also been studied
in LCW (Afros & Schryer, 2009).
A modest amount of research on a unit of analysis known as the topos has been
attested (Wilder, 2012; Viera Echevarría, 2014). Researchers propose that topoi are
used to narrate events, establish the commonplace status of phenomena, and offer
historical context (Fahnestock & Secor, 1991; Wilder, 2005, 2012; Wilder & Wolfe,
2009). Notable also is Wilder’s (2012) interview with a scholar who protested against
the explicit teaching of LCW strategies. The participant argued that such knowledge
may cede to the students an “unfair advantage” (185). In other words, the participant
believed that he had invested a great deal of effort in an implicit learning of successful
writing strategies. As such, he felt that anyone who aimed to achieve similar degrees
of success should follow a path much like his.
As a counterpoint to traditional attitudes toward Inner Circle (Kachru, 1992)
English-language academic publishing, it also becomes necessary to draw on other
disciplines to allow for more freedom in a larger array of voices engaging in the
scholarly conversation rather than merely reinforcing an idealization of past norms.
To begin, the term World Englishes may refer to the ways in which humans around
the world use the English language, with an emphasis on avoiding partiality toward
one variety of English over another (Kachru & Nelson, 2006). The term Inner Circle
tends to refer to a group of countries in which English holds a status as the dominant
language among the majority of citizens. Inner Circle countries include Australia,
Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. (Kachru, 1992). In the field of academic publishing,
the hegemony of Inner Circle British and US varieties has posed a challenge for
users of other English varieties whose articles may be rejected due in part to their
being written in non-standard English varieties. These difficulties are compounded
by institutional pressures to publish in one’s home country (Belcher, 2007). A crucial
contribution afforded by research on World Englishes is a rebuttal to the notion that
English users from around the world must acquire the grammatical norms from one
area in the world. Indeed, more productive conversations can be held by English users
worldwide recognizing and appreciating the uniqueness each English-language user
brings (Mair, 2016).
Lexical Bundles
In the present section, with caution afforded by a World Englishes perspective, we

review advances in the study of formulaic language, which gave way to lexical
bundles (hereafter LBs). LBs are defined as n-grams of three words or more which
tend to manifest themselves in corpora of specific text genres (Biber et al., 1999;
Cortes, 2015). A source closely credited with informing the development of LBs
as a construct is work by Altenberg (1993), as well as Altenberg and Eeg-Olofsson
(1990) on recurring sequences in written English texts.
While n-grams refer to word sequences of any length and frequency of occurrence
(Doddington, 2002), LBs stand out as holding three distinct criteria: genre specificity,
range, and frequency constraints. That is, the phrase from an abstract cited in the
previous section, dramatizes the functions of travel and tourism, is a 7-gram that
occurs only once in a corpus. While it may hold some article-specific implications
when analyzed deeply, it is difficult to teach this phrase or to argue that it is a phrase
that should appear as-is in literary research projects when compared to a lexical
bundle attested in LCW writing (Lake, 2020), such as can be read as a, a bundle
which occurred more than twenty times and in five or more texts. In fact, can be
read as a has been found to serve as a building block in making interpretations of
phenomena present in novels (Lake, 2020).
Several studies on university student-produced academic writing yield some
support for the idea that students may benefit from learning the LBs which recur
in texts produced by experts in their target disciplines (Chen & Baker, 2010;
Cortes, 2004, 2006; Shin & Kim, 2017; Shin et al., 2018). Descriptive studies have
contributed to knowledge of the teaching of academic writing in civil engineering
(Gilmore & Millar, 2018), education (Candarli & Jones, 2019), chemistry (Jalali,
2014), telecommunications (Pan et al., 2016), psychology (Lake & Cortes, 2020b),
and literary criticism (Johnston, 2017; Lake, 2020; Lake & Cortes, 2020a).
Whereas Lake and Cortes (2020a) examined expert-level LCW and Johnston
(2017) studied LBs produced by students, less is known about comparative patterns
between writers in both groups. To that end, further comparisons in this area
could inform the design of pedagogical materials to address needs identified among
learners. The resulting data may, in turn, serve to open up doors for further partic-
ipation in the genre from scholars in the Outer and Expanding Circles of English
users. The Outer Circle refers to countries in which English is spoken as a result of
the colonial history of the British Empire. The Expanding Circle, in turn, refers in
part to countries whose citizens may often learn English for professional purposes
(Kachru, 1992). It has been found that scholars in both the Outer and Expanding
circles face institutional pressures from several directions to publish (cf. Belcher,
2007). To address these gaps, the following section delineates a study we designed
which seeks to yield insight into the area of teaching LCW strategies to a wider
audience.
Methods
Corpora
MICUSP
The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) is a corpus of
writing from students in specific major fields collected at the University of Michigan
(MICUSP, 2009; Römer & Wulff, 2010). Of the ninety-eight papers written by
English majors in MICUSP, it was decided that those under the category of Argumen-
tative Essay would prove the most similar to LCAs. The MICUSP English section
of Argumentative Essays contains sixty-five entries. However, eleven of those are
produced by graduate students. Since the purpose of this paper is to examine papers
produced by undergraduate students and experts, the eleven produced by graduate
students were excluded from the sample. The supplemental MICUSP data also states
that six of the undergraduate argumentative essays were produced by students whose
first language was Mandarin Chinese, with an additional one written by a native
speaker of Urdu. The remainder of the papers came from L1 English users.
The Expert Literary Criticism Corpus
The present study analyzed an English corpus used in a previous project (Lake, 2020).
This corpus was aligned using the following situational variables (Biber & Conrad,
2009). First, each article was gathered from primarily Inner Circle (Kachru, 1992)
literary criticism journals appearing in the MLA International Bibliography. Next, to
ensure maximum comparability of each text in the corpus, only studies that examined
single novels are included. Consequently, comparative analyses, along with studies
on films, poems, short stories, auto/biographies, and plays were omitted. A corpus
of one million words was collected using these criteria, since a million words have
been outlined as a viable amount of discourse from which to make empirically-
founded inferences with regards to specific varieties of discourse (Biber & Conrad,
2001). Table 5.1 contains data on this corpus, along with the total word counts from
Table 5.1 English corpus composition by country, journal, articles, and word count
Journal LCAs Initial word count of articles Word counts after direct
quotes were removed
Australian Literary Studies 10 73,601 57,359
Canadian Literature 24 162,944 132,324
Canadian Review of 19 154,249 121,923
American Studies
Literator 24 165,478 129,451
Journal of Postcolonial 24 156,310 127,805
Writing
American Literature 16 175,794 139,590
Multi-Ethnic Literature of 25 250,308 202,481
the U.S
Publications of the Modern 10 94,709 75,409
Language Association
Total 152 1,233,393 986,342
each journal before and after the removal of direct quotes, a practice encouraged in
previous academic writing research (Cortes, 2008).
Lexical Bundles
AntConc (Anthony, 2014) was used to generate three- to six-word lexical bundles
from the Expert Literary Criticism Corpus. Context horizons for each bundle were
inspected in AntConc to ensure that as few as possible of the lexical bundles detected
overlapped with one another, in line with past research on redundancy in the data
caused by overlapping bundles (cf. Chen & Baker, 2010; Ribeck & Borin, 2014). This
dataset resulted in 301 bundles. These were categorized by structure and function, in
line with past taxonomies (Biber et al., 2003; Cortes, 2008). Then, SiNLP (Crossley
et al., 2014), a software tool that generates spreadsheet files showing the number
of times a set of words or phrases occurs in a collection of documents, was used to
measure the number of times that bundles in the Stance category occurred in each
of the files in the expert corpus and student corpus. We operationalize the Stance
category in line with prior studies, which present it as one in which the author
expresses an opinion (Biber et al., 2003) on a given topic.
Dispersion
Dispersion is operationalized as the number of distinct documents in which a lexical

item occurs in a collection of texts (Gries, 2019). Thus, dispersion levels of the Stance
bundles were measured in the LCAs and Argumentative Essays. To understand more
about how the bundles were used in context, only articles that contained any of
the Stance bundles in the expert corpus were chosen in the final set. After some
random sampling, fifty-four articles meeting those standards were randomly sampled
to match the fifty-four in the MICUSP Argumentative Essay subset. Table 5.2 shows
the final two corpora chosen for the analysis.
We see here that the mean word count of an LCA is about three and a half times
longer than that of a student argumentative essay.
Table 5.2 Comparison of

Group Texts Mean word count (SD) Total
words per text file
Student 54 1826.2 (692.8) 98,615
Expert 54 6,419.8 (1482.2) 346,669
Normalized Frequency Calculation
Inspecting recurring patterns in the lexical bundle list for literary criticism (Lake,
2020), a decision was made to measure all instances of the pronoun I, the noun fact,
and all conjugations of the verb to be. These words tended to figure into many of
the Stance bundles, so measuring individual occurrences of each appeared to be a
useful decision to understand larger trends in differences between student and expert
writing. Keeping in mind the differences in word count between argumentative essays
and published literary criticism research articles, frequency tokens of each of these
three lexical items in each document were normalized to occurrences per thousand
words, in line with past comparisons of linguistic features among documents of
varying lengths (Biber, 1988).
Statistical Analysis
Simple dispersion levels of lexical bundles in both corpora were calculated, as the
nature of the present study is exploratory. Differences in the percentages obtained
are discussed qualitatively in the next section. Additionally, Mann–Whitney U tests
were performed to determine whether there were any significant differences in the
tokens normalized to occurrences per thousand words in fact, I, and tokens of all
conjugations of the verb to be.
Results
We begin with a discussion of the individual comparisons in words. Of the three

words examined, fact and conjugations of to be occurred significantly more often
per thousand words in student writing. The results are shown in Table 5.3.
I, however, occurred significantly more often in expert writing, suggesting a possi-
bility of slightly greater autonomy expressed in expert-level writing. Indeed, Table
5.4 reveals that of the expert-level papers chosen for this analysis, 13% contained the
bundle I argue that, while none in the MICUSP sample chose to do the same.
We return to case studies on differences in this table in the Discussion section.
Additionally, Table 5.5 reveals Stance bundles shared in both corpora.
Table 5.3 Differences in I,

Word Student (Mean (SD)) Expert (Mean (SD))
fact, and all conjugations of
to be in the student and expert I 0.77 (3.02) 1.04 (1.41)
corpora Fact 0.86 (0.90) 0.54 (0.45)
To be 37.4 (12.2) 26.0 (8.6)
Table 5.4 Lexical bundles

Lexical bundle Expert (%)
not found in the MICUSP
sample Critique of the 30
I argue that 13
The novel is 44
In the novel is 13
Of the novel is 11
Through the lens of 9
Turns out to be 15
Table 5.5 Four-plus-word

Bundle Expert (%) Student (%) Difference (%)
Stance bundles shared in both
corpora That there is a 11 7 4
To the fact that 11 6 6
Is a form of 7 2 6
Can be seen as a 9 2 6
Draws attention 9 4 6
to the
By the fact that 13 4 9
Can be read as a 15 4 11
Despite the fact 17 4 13
that
The fact that the 28 9 19
While the student corpus did use the word fact more, lexical bundles that
incorporate fact tended to occur more often in the expert-level corpus.
In the same vein, Table 5.6 shows that many of the three-word Stance bundles
chosen in the present study contain a conjugation of the verb to be.
In the following section, we explore strategies that go into making an LCA longer
than a student paper, using LBs as a point of departure.
Discussion
The present study examined differences in lexical items used to express an opinion in
expert-level and novice-level literature writing. The results suggest that shared three-
word bundles are more common in both corpora than are longer bundles. Additionally,
longer bundles, as well as those referring to research, prevail in expert-level texts.
In the following sections, we discuss case studies of lexical bundles shared by both
corpora and a discussion of those occurring only in expert-level writing, incorporating
remarks from World Englishes perspectives.
Table 5.6 Three-word

Bundle Expert (%) Student (%) Difference (%)
Stance bundles shared in both
corpora Attention to the 44 11 33
The fact that 66 34 32
To be a 52 20 32
Be read as 33 6 27
It is a 44 18 26
Argues that the 31 5 26
It is the 49 25 24
This is a 29 6 23
That it is 46 25 21
Suggests that the 27 6 21
Is not a 33 17 16
The importance 31 15 16
of
To suggest that 24 8 16
That can be 23 8 15
Points out that 18 3 15
It is not 47 32 15
It is this 20 6 14
There is a 44 31 13
That he is 33 20 13
Appears to be 21 8 13
Seems to be 25 14 11
There is no 37 28 9
To be the 25 18 7
This is the 22 15 7
That they are 25 20 5
Shared Bundles
In this section, we discuss lexical bundles shared in both corpora. Examples 1 and 2
contain a bundle that occurred in both corpora and was used to put forth an interpre-
tation of a given novel. It bears mentioning that the paper in Example 1 was written
by a writer categorized as a non-native English-speaker, whereas Example 2 comes
from an article in an Inner Circle journal.
(1) The Vicar of Wakefield, by Oliver Goldsmith, can be read as a satire because
of the exaggerated portrayal of innocence and gullibility, particularly in the
case of Dr. Primrose. (ENG.g0.18.3.txt)
(2) Tuyen’s breaching of her mother’s space can be read as a beginning effort to
control Quy’s presence in her surroundings; by seeking it out, she can at last
then control its place in her life. (en_514.txt)
Example 1, from the student sample, fits into Rosmarin’s (1985) remarks that the
teaching of literature has consisted of classifying works into a predefined set of genres
to establish a framework within which to discuss works of literature. Example 2,
however, focuses on an interpretation of a character’s actions.
The variant can be seen as a, occurring in both corpora, as shown in Example
3, mirrors Example 1 by situating a work into a larger artistic context. Example 4,
however, uses the bundle to interpret a character’s actions.
(3) His choice of a “trashy” genre, then, can be seen as a conscious attempt to
overturn contemporary genre hierarchies and commonplace aesthetic proto-
cols, using the trash objects of science fiction to recreate the genre, in the way
that assemblage artists used found objects to redefine sculpture and painting.
(en_472.txt)
(4) In addition to heightening the tension between submission and rebellion, the
battle royal can be seen as a contrast of the narrator’s personality, between his
youth and later developed self. (ENG.g0.19.2.txt)
In all, one sees that the bundles can be read as a and can be seen as a represent
manifestations of skills possessed by both learners and experts in LCW: presenting
examples from texts in defense of larger arguments (Viera Echevarría, 2014).
In line with the results of this study which found that learners used the word fact
more than did experts, we turn to two examples with LBs containing the word fact.
Example 5 shows one student’s use of the word fact to analyze the attitude of a
character in Milton’s 17th-century epic poem Paradise Lost.
(5) [F]or instance, despite the fact that her only experience of weather is the
temperate atmosphere of Eden, Eve expresses her preference for the fluctuating
conditions of the year’s seasons (ENG.g0.23.1.txt).
Example 6, however, branches out further into regarding elements of scholarly
conversation about novels as facts.
(6) As such, the text holds an important place in the newly emerging and widely
contested field of Caribbean queer studies, despite the fact that it has not yet
received much scholarly coverage. (en_566.txt)
A recent interview between the Modern Language Association (MLA), which
promotes many of the standards for scholarly writing about literature, and the authors
of the MLA research guide includes the following observations:
From the beginning, scholars have used articles and books to communicate with one another
about their discoveries, theories, results, and so on. And when they’re in the classroom,
students are learning how to be scholars in the subject matter of the class. [...] To successfully
join a scholarly conversation, though, students must acquire the necessary research skills to
find where it is happening (Christenberry & Brookbank, 2019).
In line with these remarks, the preliminary teaching of LBs associated with the citing
of research and making interpretations, such as can be read as, can be seen as, and
despite the fact that, may prove beneficial for learners.
Consequently, while one might initially conclude from here that more studies on
additional LBs related to research merit further examination, it is important to take
into account remarks from World Englishes research. Hart (1986), after all, writes that
“genre analysis is pattern-seeking rather than pattern-imposing” (qtd. in Kachru &
Nelson, 2006, 296). In this way, they regard it as important to show students how to
write, rather than what to write, in training to become professionals in specific genres.
Additionally, it should be emphasized that the students participating in MICUSP
were majority Inner Circle English users. Despite what World Englishes scholars
may emphasize, it is clear that Inner Circle countries have a monopoly on what
constitutes correctness in an academic context. With this caveat, we use the students’
comparative data as a potential reference point for the difference between novice
and expert-level skills used in literary criticism pieces. In the following section, in
an exploration of Research Question #2, which seeks to identify which strategies are
worth teaching undergraduate English majors, we turn to a discussion of some LBs
present only in the expert-level corpus.
LBs Found in Expert-Level LCW
The following set of lexical bundles did not occur in MICUSP. They appear to show
higher-level LCW strategies. Example 7, for instance, adds historical context to an
argument (cf. Fahnestock & Secor, 1991; Wilder, 2012) and expresses an opinion
about the noteworthiness thereof.
(7) It is worth noting that there is a history of female participation in African liber-
ation struggles—female combatants in Umkhonto we sizwe, the armed wing
of the African National Congress (ANC), being a case in point. (en_409.txt)
Jalali (2017) found that a number of lexical bundles that include the pattern of
complement clauses instantiated by the pronoun it, known as “the anticipatory it”,
tend to be characteristic of more advanced scholarly writing, indicating that a scholar
may begin to feel confident in the creative process.
Also relevant to the idea of confidence is the fact that, as shown in Table 5.3,
the pronoun I occurs significantly more often in expert-level writing than in novice
writing. The sole bundle containing the pronoun in expert-level LCW is demonstrated
in the following example.
(8) In this essay, I argue that Goto’s novel proposes a cross-border ethic as a
strategy to counteract those necropolitical assemblages that govern contem-
porary societies, while simultaneously advocating for alternative logics of
embodiment, affect, and ethical intervention. (en_426.txt)
This bundle, then, is used to demonstrate the thesis statement of the article. While the
authors of this chapter are not aware of a study that analyzes personal pronoun use
in LCW, the usage of the pronoun I in patterns similar to thesis statements has been
defined as “I as conductor of research”, defined as a way in which “writers claim
authority and exhibit ownership of the content of their writing” (Sheldon, 2009, 255).
As a means of determining the acceptability of defining oneself as the driver of
the sentence in the proposal of claims, Hyland (2002) proposes the presentation of
exercises in which students read articles from their chosen disciplines and examine
personal pronoun use. Similar exercises in autonomy may prove worthwhile in the
development of LCW skills.
Lastly, we discuss the bundle critique of the, which appears sometimes when
summarizing scholarly debates from prior research, as shown in Examples 9 and 10:
(9) The novel’s examination of the position of women in contemporary society
and the critique of the ideals of feminine beauty is a discussion which
Evaristo has already entered into in Lara ([1997] 2009), and which she identi-
fies as the main drive in The Emperor’s Babe (Evaristo, “On the Road”)—both
texts that are also concerned with discussions of race and slavery. (en_546.txt)
(10) Other critics have likewise acclaimed O’Neill’s novel for its postcolonial
critique of the United States of America (see Wood; Hill). (en_500.txt)
In these examples, we note that, although LCW is known for referring to past scholars
less often when compared to psychology (Lake & Cortes, 2020a; MacDonald, 1994),
it nonetheless occurs in observable ways with a recognized set of phrases that realize
specific purposes in the larger text. In all, these bundles, while not used in all articles
from the corpus, show that recurrent phrases in LCW occur to highlight contex-
tual information, and present the thesis of an article, while also engaging with and
synthesizing past research.
Conclusion
The present study sought to explore which lexical bundles from expert-level LCW
appear in undergraduate argumentative papers. It has also aimed to highlight some
strategies worth teaching to undergraduates, revealed by differences in LBs that occur
in both corpora. In all, this project reveals that skills present among both learners
and experts include interpreting characters’ actions and situating works as part of
larger contexts in literary history, as shown by the LB can be read as a. However, the
marked preference for the bundles critique of the, it is worth noting that, and I argue
that in expert writing shows that learners may benefit from more training in citing
past studies and expressing the purposes of their work with greater confidence. In
this way, the findings address concerns from prior studies which argue that one finds
less transparency as to how LCW is achieved, compared to other fields (Thieme,
2017; Warren, 2006).
Future studies could incorporate these findings into the development of reading
exercises (cf. Robinson et al., 2008) in which readers are asked to look for tokens of
specific phrases and determine the kind of function which they use. Educators could
also design materials aimed at encouraging students to write LBs as they practice the
production of academic texts (cf. Cortes, 2004). Above all, however, in this debate,
we give the last word to scholars around the world, noting that a large amount of
possibility awaits researchers as a promotion of accepting more ways of instantiating
communicative purposes beyond those we present as potentially teachable in the
results and discussion sections of the present study (Kachru & Nelson, 2006). That is,
at the time of writing, World Englishes research tends to manifest more at theoretical
levels rather than at the practical levels. As such, most descriptive studies of academic
writing tend to focus on Inner Circle varieties. Consequently, additional research
could also compare and contrast lexical bundles found in journals housed in the
Expanding, Outer, and Inner Circles to identify a larger number of possibilities with
which literary scholars could express themselves and exercise their right to participate
in a wider array of scholarly conversations.
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Chapter 6
Translation Beyond the Margins
Hanan Bennoudi
Abstract Translation is not only a place where previously separated cultures come
together, it is also a place of multiplicity and dialogue; a place of inequality and
conflict. Translation is a cultural transfer that entails a process of deconstruction
and reconstruction in order to render a new text for a new readership in a new
socio-cultural milieu. This paper investigates translation as a rewriting, focusing on
a comparative analysis of For Bread Alone, the translation of ‫ ﺍﻟﺨﺒﺰ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﻓﻲ‬, a novel by
the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri. My objective is to show that translation has
shifted from being a mere linguistic operation to being a process of selection, omis-
sion, and reconstruction of meaning. Therefore, the questions this paper addresses
include the following: What happens to a text when it is transferred from one socio-
cultural milieu into a different one? What types of problems do translators face when
the source language and the target language belong to different linguistic, cogni-
tive, and cultural environments? How can translation be an act of rewriting? Can a
translator be considered a traitor or a creator?
Keywords Source language · Target language · Culture · Text deconstruction ·

Text reconstruction
Introduction
Over the years, translation has, undoubtedly, played a very important role in bringing
people and cultures closer despite their different linguistic and socio-cultural environ-
ments. It is thanks to translation that works of literature, philosophy, and mythology
have crossed the frontiers of east and west, and traveled to new settings to allow
readers to discover new literary and cultural productions. Throughout time, trans-
lation has proved to be a process that goes beyond the margins of the languages
involved, a “transcultural act” (Vermeer, 1994, cited in Snell-Hornby, 1994, 13) that
requires the understanding of both source and target cultures in order to transfer the
H. Bennoudi (B)
Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco
e-mail: h.bennoudi@uiz.ac.ma
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_6
86 H. Bennoudi
textual material in the most relevant and appropriate way. By disregarding the cultural
aspects of texts under translation, there is a high risk of creating misunderstandings
or offences toward the target text (TT) audience. To comprehend the act of transla-
tion, we need to be aware of the intrinsic relationship between language and culture,
the two fundamental components of translation. Commenting on this relationship,
Witherspoon states, “If we look at culture from a linguistic point of view, we get a
one-sided view of culture. If we look at language from a cultural point of view, we
get a one-sided view of language” (1980, 2). Therefore, neither text production nor
text translation happens in isolation of its socio-cultural milieu.
The main aim of this paper is to tackle a close reading of the English translation
of Mohamed Choukri’s ‫ ﺍﻟﺨﺒﺰ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﻓﻲ‬AlKhobz Alhafi and to inquire into some of the
fallacies committed by the translator, Paul Bowles, who approached the story by
recreating the narratives and giving the text a new identity through the use of strategies
he deemed appropriate to ensure a unique rewriting. Therefore, the omissions and
additions the translator deemed necessary in his translation resulted in a diverse and
rich text, but one that is often incongruous with the source text. In the first part of
this paper, I will investigate the cultural dimension of translation while the second
part aims at showing how translation has become a rewriting process. We will look at
how ‫ ﺍﻟﺨﺒﺰ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﻓﻲ‬AlKhobz Alhafi has crossed the borders of source language to become
a new text, For Bread Alone, based on criteria that have governed its acceptance in
a new socio-cultural environment. These criteria include the linguistic, ideological,
religious, and institutional, and they dictate the translation strategy that was adopted
by Paul Bowles, an American expatriate composer, author, and translator, in which
role he became a mediator between two different cultures.
Translation and Culture
According to Snell Hornby (1988), the exclusion of the cultural aspect from a discus-
sion of translation stems the traditional approach in linguistics, which draws a sharp
dividing line between language and “extralinguistic reality” (culture and situation).
The contemporary approach, Hornby nuances, sees language as an integral part
of culture; this intrinsic relationship between language and culture has led to the
treatment of translation as a primarily “cultural act.” This is confirmed by Bassnett
who says, “I try as I may, I cannot take language out of culture or culture out of
language” (1998, 81). For example, translating into Arabic a simple sentence like
“He went to the cinema with his girlfriend” can be problematic because the notion
of boyfriend/girlfriend is inappropriate for an Arab audience and in some contexts,
is forbidden. However, translating it as ‫ ﺻﺪﻳﻘﺔ‬/friend would not be correct either. A
choice might be ‫ ﺧﻄﻴﺒﺔ‬/fiancée, although the latter clearly has a different meaning
and is used in a different context (when a man officially proposes to a woman,
she is his fiancée). Even with this simple example, then, it is clear that no matter
how competent a translator can be and how familiar s/he is with the linguistic and
cultural background of both SL and TL, there are always “alien” words or concepts
6 Translation Beyond the Margins 87
that pose problems. The resultant translation, then, is often problematic, and may
cause misunderstanding or confusion to the target audience coming from a different
cultural background (social standards, religion, norms, habits…. etc.). To illustrate,
the proverb “‫ ”ﺍﻁﻮﻝ ﻣﻦ ﺷﻬﺮ ﺍﻟﺼﻴﺎﻡ‬in Arabic cannot be rendered as “longer than a month
of fasting” because the target reader might not have the same concept of fasting
depending on his\her religion. Therefore, the notion of length, exhaustion and even
boredom can only be reflected by a proverb that has the same communicative func-
tion, which is “longer than a month of Sundays.” Baker (1992, 68) confirms that “the
way a language chooses to express or not express various meanings can be depicted
and only occasionally matches the way another language chooses to express the same
reality.” The translator’s decisions on what is relevant to the target reader are “based
on his intuitions or beliefs” (Gutt, 1991, 112). The scholar holds that “the translator
does not have direct access to the cognitive environment of his audience, he does not
actually know what it is like—all he can have is some assumptions or beliefs about
it” (quoted in Almanna & Farghal, 2015, 28).
Therefore, translators “have to be aware of the fact that readers’ expectations,
their norms, and values, are influenced by culture and that their comprehension of
utterances is to a large extent determined by these expectations, norms, and values”
(Kussmaul, 1995, 70), and “pragmatically speaking, a target reader is bound within
an ‘environmental bubble’ of his or her own normality, or model of the world”
(Munday, 2009, 83). Hervey and Higgins state that “the most obvious features which
may prove impossible to preserve in a TT are ‘cultural’ in a very general sense,
arising from the simple fact of translating messages from one culture to another—
references to the source culture’s history, geography, literature, folklore, and so on”
(1992, 28). Another example illustrating this problem would be the Moroccan Arabic
word “‫“ ” ﺍﻟﺪﻓﻮﻉ‬dfou3”; this word cannot be translated into English because it is absent
from the cultural and linguistic repertoire of the target audience. In fact, it refers
to a ritual during a Moroccan wedding, which is considered as socially essential.
In this ritual, the groom sends, in an official parade, all gifts to be offered to the
bride. In some regions in Morocco, this might even include a cow or sheep to be
slaughtered for the occasion. To overcome such problems in translation, Vinay and
Darbelnet suggest among other strategies, the use of “Borrowing,” whereby the SL
word is transferred directly to the TL to fill the semantic gap and add local color in
TT. This strategy makes the mysterious native, and the exotic and the unfamiliar,
visible in the translated text. Venutti (2008, 15–16) explains that foreignization is
“a highly desirable…strategic cultural intervention which seeks to send the reader
abroad by making the receiving culture aware of the linguistic and cultural differ-
ences inherent in the foreign text” (quoted in Munday, 2012, 219). This is a strategy
that Bowles employed in For Bread Alone. The translator (Bowles, 1993) borrowed
some Moroccan Arabic words like taifor, tas, majoun, sebsi, zigdoun… and provided
an approximate meaning for each in the glossary. This, in fact, adds foreignness to the
text, allows the readers to travel to the world of ST, and, therefore, allows the original
text to come through in translation. So, thanks to Bowles’ translation, Choukri’s text
has succeeded in crossing the borders of different linguistic and cultural environ-
ments. It has gone beyond the linguistic boundaries and has, therefore, become a
88 H. Bennoudi
means of an intercultural exchange between the different worlds of ST and TT. In

other words, For Bread Alone has given the opportunity to the source text to speak
another language and allowed ‫ ﺍﻟﺨﺒﺰ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﻓﻲ‬to survive and relive in another culture with
a new identity.
Manipulating or Rewriting Source Text?
Translation is considered a means of crossing the borders of the SL and going beyond
any margins imposed by the ST, be they linguistic, cultural, historical, or ideological.
However, this border crossing can, in some cases, be carried out in a manipulative way.
In this respect, Bassnett and Trivedi (1999, 2) write: “Translation is not an innocent,
transparent activity but is highly charged with signification at every stage; it rarely, if
ever, involves a relationship of equality between texts, authors or systems.” As such,
they argue that translation is a cultural act, associated with “a highly manipulative
activity that involves all kinds of stages in the process of transfer across linguistic
and cultural boundaries” (ibid).
In translation studies, manipulation is one of the most controversial phenomena.
It can occur for different reasons and we can distinguish between different types
of manipulation. Katan believes that “the very act of translating involves skillful
manipulation” (1999, 140). Translation as the most obvious type of rewriting can
never free itself from the political and literary power structures existent within a
given culture: “translation, like all (re)writings, is never innocent. There is always
a context in which the translation takes place, always a history from which a text
emerges and into which a text is transposed” (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1990, 11).
There is also no consensus on whether a given translation is manipulative or
not: what some would consider manipulation, others would take as creativity and
reproduction. Boase-Beier and Holman (1999, 9) emphasize the translator’s presence
in the translated text. They confirm that “like the original author, the translator, too,
will have hierarchies of aims and agendas, some conscious, other less so, and in
different ways these will all constrain and color the recreated SL text.” From the
viewpoint of cultural norms, any translation might be considered as manipulation. It
is also important to note that manipulation arising due to ideological, economic, and
cultural considerations proceeds in a conscious way, whereas manipulation ascribed
to the features of human psychology and due to ignorance (lack of language, culture,
or world knowledge) might be termed as unconscious manipulation. As Farahzad
puts it:
The conscious process leads to conscious manipulation intentionally carried out by the
translator because of various social, political and other factors. The unconscious manipulation
is mostly a psychological phenomenon and occurs under the influence of psychological
factors. (1999, 156)
Certainly, we cannot claim that everything a translator does in or to translation

is manipulation, but certain strategies under certain constraints and due to various
factors do result in manipulation. These factors can be related to culture, religion,

ideology, society, etc. According to Lefevere, there are two general constraints
that translators have to deal with when translating. These are “the translator’s own
(conscious or unconscious) ideology and “the poetics” dominant in the target culture,
i.e., the combination of literary devices, genres, motifs, prototypical characters and
situations, and symbols” (1992, 26). Therefore, manipulation can be a positive tool to
help the translator come up with a less shocking, more acceptable, and relevant trans-
lation. Bassnett and Lefevere, when discussing the results of manipulation, claim that
the latter “in its positive aspect can help in the evolution of a literature and a society.
Rewritings can introduce new concepts, new genres, new devices and the history of
translation is the history of literary innovation, of the shaping power of one culture
upon another. But rewriting can also repress innovation, distort and contain” (1990,
viii).
Turning our attention to Paul Bowles’ For Bread Alone, we see that he used
translation as a means to give him access to new stories in a new foreign culture
that he was eager to discover. Translating oral stories/tales of Moroccan writers and
storytellers like Larbi Lyachi, Mohamed Lmrabet, and Mohamed Choukri enabled
him to learn more about Moroccan people, their habits, fantasies, and values. He
was, therefore, able to shape them in order to be transported to a different audience
in a different socio-cultural milieu. Mohamed Choukri’s ‫ ﺍﻟﺨﺒﺰ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﻓﻲ‬Alkhobz alhafi is
an autobiographical novel, which describes a bleak childhood in Morocco. Fleeing
drought and starvation in the Rif region of Morocco mainly the cities of Nador and Al
Hoceima. Choukri’s family moves to Tangier and then Tetouan. Most of his relatives
and brothers die of neglect, starvation, or abuse, but he succeeds in surviving the
violent beatings of his father, the pangs of hunger, and the dangers of the street. He
lives by begging, petty theft, prostitution, smuggling, and occasional work, and he
learns to enjoy sex, drugs, and alcohol. The novel ends with Mohamed’s decision
to learn how to read and write, and he went on to become a writer and a lecturer
in Arabic literature. It is worth mentioning, though, that Choukri had to reduce the
source text written in standard Arabic into Moroccan Arabic, Darija. Then both writer
and translator used “Spanish and French for ascertaining certain shades of meaning”
(Bowles, 1993, 5).
In his translation of this unique story, Bowles chose not to translate literally the
part where Choukri describes his father killing his brother, perhaps in order not to
shock the target reader. Even at the end of the novel, Bowles omits the sentence
referring to this murder while Choukri significantly opens and closes the novel with
the violence of his father that is part and parcel of the sordid life he lived in Tangier. To
illustrate, Choukri writes in Arabic: ‘ ‫ ﻟﻢ ﻳﻌﺶ ﺳﻮﻯ ﻣﺮﺿﻪ ﺛﻢ ﻗﺘﻠﻪ ﺃﺑﻲﺍ‬.‫( ﻟﻡ ﻳﺬﻧﺐ‬1982, 233)/“He
did not sin. All he did was to live his illness and then be killed by my father” (my
own translation) while Bowles says “my little brother never had a chance to sin. All
he did was to live his illness” (1993, 169). Bowles’ translation, then, is an example
of what Bassnett describes:
Stories are always changed in their retelling, just as translations always change the original
text upon which they are based. There can never be sameness in translation, for a text moves
90 H. Bennoudi
across language so as it is decoded and recoded, dis-remembered and re-membered, reshaped

and remade into a new original to be read anew. (2014, 165)
Bowles was aware that a translator can never be fully faithful in what s/he is
transferring. He states that “in some sense, he’s [the translator] a traitor. I want to
carry it over the border intact, but of course, that’s impossible” (quoted in Caponi,
1993, 199). Within translation, a transformation occurs whereby the translator takes
the position of a negotiator and a reproducer; a decision-maker who is going to
choose what best fits the target text and its audience’s expectations. A logical question
that arises, then, is: Can this transformation be an innocent act? “Literature is not
innocent. Neither is translation” (Faiq, 2007, vii). We know that words do not occur
in a vacuum. They might embody suppositions, beliefs and conventions that reflect
“… the ways a given culture constructs and partitions reality” (Hatim & Mason,
1990, 67). A foreign text can, therefore, reflect issues on identity and difference, and
can display an ensemble of representations, images, poetics, and values representing
a culture and the people of that culture. Transporting this text to a different milieu
and trying to make it relevant can be a difficult and manipulative act which gives
birth to a rewritten text for a new readership within a new milieu.
For many years, translation scholars have underlined the fact that “translation,
by necessity, involves manipulation and subversion of linguistic and cultural tradi-
tions” (Faiq, 2005, 57). So, when manipulation intervenes as the sole choice left
for the translator, especially when source text and target text display unresolvable
dissimilarities at linguistic, semantic, and cultural levels, it can be justified. However,
if manipulation entails distortion, maneuvering, and changing the origin it can lead
to disastrous misunderstanding and efface some of the foreign text’s peculiarities
because “source texts become situated into ways of representation (chains of signs)
ingrained in the shared experience and institutional norms of the translating commu-
nity or communities (self, selves, us)” (Faiq, 2007, 11). Each decision a translator
makes can take him/her near to or far from an encounter with the Other. After
the translator’s choices, translation should become a dynamic communication, a
creative dialogue, and a lively exchange between the Self (translating culture) and
the Other (translated text). Venuti confirms that “translation wields enormous power
in constructing representations of foreign cultures” (1998, 67). However, when trans-
lators shape their work in a way that would not read as a translation by adopting the
images, the aesthetics, and even sometimes the ideology of target language, they
negate the otherness reflected in the foreign text and therefore the latter loses its
identity.
To illustrate with Bowles’ For Bread Alone, Bowles dropped out the Amazigh
words used by Choukri in the original work. Therefore, he disallowed the readers
the chance to know that the Arab world is a melting pot of nations, languages,
dialects, social, and religious practices. Choukri’s choice to incorporate Tarifit (the
Amazigh language spoken in the Rif region in North Morocco) is not without its
reason. It is done with the aim of endowing the text with the desired authenticity
and singularity. Also, the use of Tarifit symbolizes the writer’s attachment to his
mother and his unconditional love and support for her against the violent patri-
archal behavior of the father, who was aware of this special and close relation-
ship between mother and son, and hated both of those reasons. Choukri writes
“‫ﻻ ﺗﺒﺎﻟﻴﺎﻥ ﺃﺑﺪﺍ ﺑﻤﺎ ﺃﻗﻮﻟﻪ‬،‫ ﻛﻼﻛﻤﺎ ﻳﺤﺎﻭﻝ ﺃﻥ ﻳﺪﺍﻓﻊ ﻋﻦ ﺍﻵﺧﺮ‬.‫ ﺗﺘﻮﺍﻁﺂﻥ ﻋﻠﻲ‬.‫( ”ﺍﻧﻬﺎ ﺩﺍﺋﻤﺎ ﺗﺪﻟﻠﻚ‬2010, 95) translated
by Bowles as « She spoils you the whole time. You plot together against me. You
defend each other. You never listen to what I tell you» (1993, 67). But later in the
novel Bowles makes reference to Choukri speaking and understanding Tarifit or
Riffian, as he used it:
…and spoke to me in Riffian. What’s that? (ibid, 12)
I leapt into the air, crying out in Riffian: Ay mainou ! Ay mainou! (ibid, 14)
It is clear, then, that “Translating naturally involves the transporting (carrying over)
of languages and their associated cultures to and recuperated by specific target reading
constituencies. These constituencies have, at their disposal, established systems of
representation, with norms and conventions for the production and consumption
of meanings vis-à-vis people, objects and events” (Faiq, 2007, 1). In other words,
translation is a process which includes the deconstructing of the ST, manipulating
it, then rewriting it as the TL. On this, Tymoczko and Gentzler (2002, xxi) clearly
proclaim that:
Translation is not simply an act of faithful reproduction but, rather, a deliberate and conscious
act of selection, assemblage, structuration and fabrication—and even, in some cases of
falsification, refusal of information, counterfeiting and the creation of secret codes. (quoted
in Bassnett, 2011, 45)
To provide more examples, on a number of occasions in the novel Choukri makes

many references to Allah. The Moroccan Islamic environment encourages the use
of religious expressions like inchaallah, Allah yekhlef , Allah i3awen, astaghfir-
llah….etc. Bowles seems to ignore this in his translation and fails to reflect this image
of Moroccans. An example is when Choukri describes his father cursing everyone
and even God, he says in Arabic “ ‫( ” ﺛﻢ ﻳﺴﺘﻐﻔﺮﻩﻳﺴﺐ ﺍﻟﻌﺎﻟﻢ ﺩﺍﺋﻤﺎ ﻭ ﻳﺠﺬﻑ ﻋﻠﻰ ﷲ ﺃﺣﻴﺎﻧﺎ‬1982, 8).
However, in his translation, Bowles misses the part when the father asks for God’s
forgiveness after cursing Him. He writes “He abuses everyone with his words, some-
times even Allah” (1993, 11). It is very significant for Muslims to ask for Allah’s
forgiveness and it is part of their inherent practices whether they sin, curse or not.
To provide another example, on another occasion, Choukri made reference to Leila
albouwala. “Albowal or albowala” in Darija is used as a nickname for someone who
wets the bed. He wrote ‘ ‫( ’ ﻏﺮﻓﺘﻬﺎﻛﻨﺖ ﺟﺎﻟﺴﺎ ﻣﻊ ﻟﻴﻠﻰ ﺍﻟﺒﻮﺍﻟﺔ ﻓﻲ‬1982, 169) while in For Bread
Alone, the sentence reads “I was sitting with Leila Bouwala in her room” (1993,
125), allowing readers to assume that it is the full name of a person. However, in
Choukri’s Streetwise, the translator Ed Emery opted for a more relevant translation
“In a brothel in Tangier once I’d slept with Pissing Leila” (1996, 86). In fact, the scene
in both novels is a clear picture of the decadence of Choukri’s life: drugs, women,
dirt, violence, love, prostitution, pedophilia…etc. Bowles, however, chooses not to
focus on this decadence, opting instead, to produce a more “clean” translation, one
that would, perhaps, be more palatable to his target language audience.
92 H. Bennoudi
Because translation entails substitution, expansion, omission, interpretation

and reproduction, translators make decisions that might appear wrong to the
reader who has access to both ST and TT. In Chap. 6, Bowles writes “it
was the neighbors who forced a truce between my father and me…” (1993,
63) but skips four pages to move directly to chapter seven in the Arabic text
“ ‫ ﺍﺫﺍ ﻛﺎﻥ ﻣﻦ‬:‫( ” ﺍﻟﺨﺒﺰ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﻓﻲﺍ ﺗﻤﻨﻴﺖ ﻟﻪ ﺃﻥ ﻳﻤﻮﺕ ﻗﺒﻞ ﺍﻷﻭﺍﻥ ﻓﻬﻮ ﺃﺑﻲﺻﺮﺕ ﺃﻓﻜﺮ‬Choukri, 2010, 91)
and included the sentence “I was thinking: If there’s anybody in the world I wish
would die before his hour comes, it’s my father” (Bowles, 1993, 64) within a para-
graph in Chap. 6 in the English text. On other occasions, Bowles felt the need to add
words, expressions or sentences to really put the reader in the context. For instance,
in chapter two, he writes a sentence that does not exist in ST: “In order to feel even
drunker I began to sing Ya tetouan ma ahlak, tol omri maninsak, tol hayatia ahouak”
(1993, 32). We can clearly notice that the second part of the sentence is a transliter-
ation of an old Moroccan song, which means “Oh Tetouan, how beautiful you are, I
will never forget you, I will always love you.” So, were the missing parts accidentally
presented in this movement among four languages (Darija, French, Spanish, and
English) or was it a deliberate choice made by Bowles? Was the latter being a creator
of a new shape of a story he was told or was he a manipulator who shaped the told
story in a form that would impress the target reader? No one can tell whether Bowles’
decision was calculated or accidental, although Bowles said in one of his conversa-
tions: “I don’t think it’s possible for a Westerner to understand what goes on in an
illiterate Moroccan’s head” (quoted in Caponi, 1993, 199). Ward-Jouve (1991, 91)
comments that “the translation process implies untold selections, omissions, enlarge-
ments, that have as much to do with the translating culture, its needs and projections
as they have with the writing that is being translated” (quoted in Bassnett, 2014,
62). In this respect, I agree with Bassnett and Trivedi’s statement that “Translation is
not an innocent, transparent activity but is highly charged with signification at every
stage; it rarely, if ever, involves a relationship of equality between texts, authors or
systems” (1999, 2).
To sum up, translation is not a simple act of transferring words from a SL to a TL; it
is a pure act of creativity and rewriting that has gone through different processes and
stages. As described by Tymoczko and Gentzler, “Translation is thus not simply an
act of selection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication, and even, in some cases,
of falsification, refusal of information, counterfeiting, and the creation of secret
codes” (2002, xxii in Bassnett, 2014, 15). What is said in one language can never be
reproduced in the same form. There are always individual, societal, or ideological
factors that dominate the translation process, the decisions, and the choices of the
translator. As Faiq admits “translators usually tried to follow the original text as
closely as possible, they often added bits of information from their own knowledge
or deleted bits of information that did not confirm with their belief system” (2007,
56).
Conclusion
No one can deny that Bowles’ translation can be criticized for its inaccuracy and
flaws but it can also be praised for its beauty that has captured the hearts of millions
of foreign readers who could not, otherwise, have access to the Arabic version. If
we take into consideration that translation is a movement across different temporal
and spatial milieus, we can confirm that Bowles’ For Bread Alone is a new text
that has taken a new form to fit the context of a new receiving culture. Most critics
believe it has gained the merit of being a good translation despite the inadequacies
and mistranslations because the translator succeeded in reshaping Choukri’s story
and rewriting a new one to give access to a new readership to discover the different
worlds Mohamed Choukri had lived in. In fact, “[e]very translation, up to a certain
point is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text” (Bassnett, 1980, 38,
quoted in Bassnett & Lefevere, 1990, 92). Translating from Arabic has generally
remained a prisoner of the same discursive, ideological framework of the exotic, the
unfamiliar, the alien, and the other. However, in translating Choukri’s ( 2010) ‫ﺷﻜﺮﻱ ﻣﺤﻤﺪ‬
Alkhobz Alhafi, Bowles managed to find a compromise between giving the text a new
form, keeping the text’s identity as a foreign text and, at the same time, modifying the
parts he judged as irrelevant, shocking or misleading. Bassnett argues that translation
has recently been referred to as “… a migrant or nomadic space between cultures,
where continuities and identities are reformulated, made and unmade” (2014, 54–
55). This statement clearly justifies Bowles’ adjustments in translating Choukri’s
Alkhobz Alhafi. To conclude, For Bread Alone is an in-between space where two
languages and two cultures have come together. In fact, it is a rewriting that emerged
as a result of a process of negotiation, interpretation, elimination and addition. On
this, Bassnett points out “a good translation will read like the original, will surprise,
move or entertain us, perhaps in different ways from the original, perhaps in similar
ways, but will always be a rewriting of something written somewhere else in another
culture and in another time” (2011, 43). This Bowles’ translation achieves.
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Routledge.
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Arabic Reference
‫ ﻧﺸﺮ ﺍﻟﻔﻨﻚ‬:‫ ﺍﻟﺪﺍﺭ ﺍﻟﺒﻴﻀﺎء‬،‫( ﺍﻟﺨﺒﺰ ﺍﻟﺤﺎﻓﻲ‬2010) ‫ﺷﻜﺮﻱ ﻣﺤﻤﺪ‬.

Chapter 7
Student Translators Between Pedagogical
Grammars and Language at Work: The
Case of Aspect in English and Standard
Arabic
Kahlaoui Mohamed-Habib
Abstract How student translators, with little or no grammatical input, face prob-
lematic grammatical source text units in translating aspect into English and Arabic
remains largely under-researched. While Arabic is a highly aspectualizing language,
aspect as a grammatical operation is totally absent from grammar textbooks and
courses. To Arab undergraduate students in general, categories such as aspect,
modality, and mood are extremely opaque, as they do not even have clear equiv-
alents in Arabic grammar. What adds to such a student’s dilemma is that aspectual
formal markers, like the so-called English progressive form, are ineffectively defined
by direct assignment of meaning to meaningless categories and often approached out
of context. Based on the results of classwork with student translators, this paper high-
lights the need to update pedagogical grammar in order to reflect both the working of
language in natural contexts and the epistemic changes in post-structuralist linguis-
tics. A contrastive corpus-based grammar of English and Arabic tailored to the needs
of prospective translators is a pedagogical requirement. At the core of the transla-
tion process, contrastivity would enable students to gain enriching insight into the
working of natural languages beyond the static binaries of conventional grammars,
and enhance their interlingual competence and metalinguistic awareness.
Keywords Student translators · Pedagogical grammars · Aspect · Arabic ·

Interlingual competence
Introduction
Much of what has been written on grammatical difficulties facing student transla-
tors from and into English and Arabic (Abadneh, 2016; Zhiri, 2014; Al Jarf, 2007;
Kharma & Hajjaj, 1997; Mudhsha & Laskar, 2021) often attributes ineffective gram-
matical transfer to interlingual structural discrepancies and/or to factors, such as the
translator’s linguistic competence, negative transfer from the mother language, and
K. Mohamed-Habib (B)
e-mail: mhabibkahlaoui@yahoo.fr
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_7
96 K. Mohamed-Habib
misleading learning strategies engaged by translators, like misanalysis, oversimpli-

fication, and overgeneralization. Rarely, however, has the problem diagnosis been
associated with pedagogical grammar itself.
This chapter questions the pertinence of the above-mentioned justifications, not
only because they are more relevant to foreign/second language learning than to the
translation process, but also because by engaging the metalanguage of Psycholinguis-
tics to account for grammatically-deviant translations, it is assumed that learning a
language and learning to translate a language are not different processes; this implies
that translation errors are confounded by language errors. Even when examining
translation errors of a linguistic nature such as those related to modality, aspect,
reference to time, negation, or sentence expansion—there is no logic in stripping the
translation process of its specificity or in extrapolating the conceptual tools, find-
ings, and procedures of inquiry typical of psycholinguistic error analysis to deviant
translation productions.
This study seeks to shed light on an under-researched factor, the role of descriptive
pedagogical grammar of English and Standard Arabic, in inducing student translators
into error. Grammar courses at the school and university levels are generally asso-
ciated with a course manual, often rule-based, reflecting one of the three dominant
theoretical approaches to language, i.e., the prescriptive, descriptive, or explicative
model. For undergraduate students in general, THE grammar of a language is a
definitely established body of knowledge prescribed or described in “THE grammar
textbook” and taught and learnt in class. Grammar is, therefore, taken for granted
even when the rules, with their long lists of exceptions, the taxonomies, and the
descriptions provided, date back to many centuries ago, as is the case with Arabic.
When “the grammar textbook” confounds modality with reference to futurity in
Arabic, or assigns an extralinguistic value to an English formal marker of a metalin-
guistic status, what is expected from an undergraduate student translator negotiating
a grammatical solution in the receptor language other than retrieving the rule? In
fact, one major trigger of ineffective interlingual grammatical transfer is associated
with the student assumption that, in seeking the grammatical value of a source text
(ST) item, the grammar textbook is equal in importance to the dictionary in seeking
the semantic value of a ST lexical unit. The dictionary’s definition and the grammar
rule continue to exercise full didactic authority.
To What Extent Does Grammar Codify Language at Work?
Metalinguistic knowledge about language and grammar is a pedagogical require-

ment, especially in translator education. What should be explained to students is that
each language has its unique internal grammar, or logic, without which meaning
cannot be structured above word level. The task of linguists and grammarians, then,
is to attempt a reconstruction of that hidden logic at the origin of the working of a
7 Student Translators Between Pedagogical Grammars and Language … 97
given language. The version(s) reproduced by grammarians constitute the external

grammar of that language. This explains why we have one language and multiple
grammars. The quality of the result is relative, because every grammatical reading
“depend[s] on the theoretical research of the moment” (Adamczewski, 2002, 4), the
approach adopted, the conceptual tools deployed, and the evolutionary state of the
language under investigation. A grammar of any human language cannot ignore
the profound changes in theoretical linguistics with the advent of performance-
related disciplines, such as discourse analysis, text linguistics, pragmatics, corpus-
linguistics, and intercultural rhetoric. In the case of Arabic, we can neither look at its
modern standard state (MSA) through the lens of the pre-Islamic variety, nor ignore
the fact that the emergence of traditional grammar, which is still the prevalent frame-
work for pedagogical grammar in the Arab world, was governed by a socio-political
context where codification of the language was associated with the need to establish
a correct reading and interpretation of the Qur’ān (Suleiman, 1999; Carter 1972).
Different factors explain why a satisfactory account of the working of language
is still beyond reach: the structural intricacies of human linguistic systems, the
elusive nature of meaning and its association with various contextual factors, the
strict requirements of methodological rigor, and the limitations inherent to linguistic
approaches to language. These limitations are detectable in the long lists of excep-
tions to grammatical rules, the many instances where language at work invalidates
a prescribed rule, the assignment of meaning to meaningless formal categories, the
taxonomies which add to the frustration of students in grammar courses, and the
failure to provide a credible explanation for the difference between everyday utter-
ances, such as I leave tomorrow. vs. I’m leaving tomorrow. “The cases of the English
be + v + -ing, said to convey duration of the verbal action, and of the Arabic sa-
/sawfa ( ), ill-defined as temporal markers referring respectively to near and
remote futurity, add to the confusion of the students when a rule, formulated by their
teachers as a grammatical certainty, is not confirmed by language at work in written
or spoken discourse” (Kahlaoui, 2014, 17).
Major Deficiencies of Descriptive Pedagogical Grammars

and the Need for Translation-Oriented Grammars
A pedagogical or reference grammar may be defined as a simplified classroom-

oriented version of a theoretical or linguistic grammar which seeks to understand and
account for the working of a language beyond word level. It is developed with the
pedagogical aim to facilitate teaching and learning of languages and promote effec-
tive use of language in communication and expression. As it often draws on a theo-
retical approach to language and learning—cognitive, functional, generative, enun-
ciative, etc.—pedagogical grammar reflects the limitations inherent to the approach,
and bears the load of its theoretical anchorage.
98 K. Mohamed-Habib
A Disempowering Rule-Based Grammar
Rule formulation is a salient feature of pedagogical grammar and perhaps its major
point of vulnerability; grammatical rules, often context-insensitive, are not always
accurate, nor do they always correspond to the working of language in context,
misleading students into all kinds of—wrong generalizations (Dirven, 1990). For
Newby, “grammar tends to be taught in traditional ways which do not differ substan-
tially from how teachers themselves learned grammar at school and university”
(Newby, 2015, 13). A pertinent example is when the student translator is confronted
with a ST context that invalidates the rule prescribed for the value of be + v+ -ing
as conveying “duration of the verbal action” (Quirk & Greenbaum, 1976, 41), like
in (1)–(3) below, where there is neither action nor duration:
(1) She is not knowing me again!
(2) You are forgetting your umbrella, ma’am!
(3) Mary is resembling her mother more and more.
An example from Arabic is the modal marker sawfa , still wrongly defined in all
grammar textbooks as conveying a reference to remote future:
(4) Sawfa ‘adhabu fi-l-h.aali yaa mawlaay. (Sawfa-I-leave immediately, my Lord.)
¯
In this sentence, the adverbial prepositional phrase fi-l-h.aali, meaning right now,
locates the event in the time of speech not in the future.
A conventional problem-solving approach based on rote memorization, rule-based
grammar teaching is didactically disempowering; first, it has failed to account for the
lists of exceptions to the rule; second, it has obvious detrimental effects on students’
critical thinking potential and their analytic problem-solving skills; third, all the
hard grammar work is done by the students’ working memory, triggering memory
overload and limited cognitive performance. In such a context and to cope with
frustration and monotony, students would engage different avoidance strategies and
distracting behaviors (Fisher, 1993; Nett et al., 2010).
Direct Assignment of Meaning to Meaningless Categories
Modern English pedagogical grammars draw on the descriptive linguistic model

where language is observed, corpora collected, the linear structures described, and
grammatical rules formulated. Even though descriptive grammars of English abound,
in many EFL contexts, teaching still relies on traditional rule-based grammars. Arabic
reference grammar has remained fundamentally prescriptive, building on the work
of traditional grammarians. However, both reflect a semantic conception of grammar
that confounds language and the world. This is detectable in direct assignment of
meaning to formal grammatical categories, as shown in the following examples from
both grammars (Table 7.1).
Table 7.1 Direct assignment of meaning to formal categories

Arabic English
Formal marker Semantic value assigned Formal marker Semantic value assigned
leita Hope Be + v + -ing Duration, irritation, habit
sa Near future Will and shall Futurity
sawfa Remote future This Proximity
‘asaa Hope, compassion That Remoteness
qad Doubt Must Obligation
kalla Reprimand Should Recommendation
The treatment of be + v + -ing as conveyor of irritation in certain contexts

(Quirk & Greenbaum, 1976 p. 41), which is still in use in classrooms, particu-
larly in EFL contexts, reflects a semantic conception of the working of English
and a confusion of the linguistic and extralinguistic realities. Adamczewski and
Delmas (1982) consider that direct assignment of meaning to meaningless cate-
gories is the main reason why the descriptive approach fails to account for the
working of natural languages. The linear utterance is the final product of a complex
and multi-faceted phonological, lexical and syntactic process. Utterances exhibit on
their surface observable traces of an invisible activity, codifying the mental oper-
ations whose main object is not to enable the speaker to refer to the world, but to
indicate how the utterance was processed by the speaker in a given context. The linear
organization of the surface does not always construct the message. In an utterance
like “She must have arrived late.” The modal must, number 2 on the surface, has
nothing to do with the grammatical subject she, number 1. It is there to refer to a
processing strategy of the linguistic subject.
A Context-Insensitive Approach
Based on a structuralist approach to language, descriptive grammar is attached to

the observable/audible surface of the sentence without taking account of its context
of production. This is why exemplification in grammar textbooks is often based on
artificial sentences produced out of context and for the sole purpose of demonstration.
In English, authoritative corpus-based grammars, such as the Longman Grammar
(Biber et al., 1999) and Cambridge Grammar (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002), have
not become a part of the language classroom, particularly in EFL contexts.
100 K. Mohamed-Habib
Disregard of the context is at the origin of the gap between descriptive grammar
and language at work and of its adverse implications on learning. How can a student
perceive the difference between the following pairs and render them into the receptor
language out of context?
(5) Who’s had a bath?
(6) Who’s been having a bath?
(7) Mary resembles her mother.
(8) Mary is resembling her mother more and more.
It was shown in previous work (Kahlaoui, 2009) that when these pairs of sentences
were provided to students out of context as a translation exercise into Arabic, 95%
of students treated them either as interchangeable, or translated the be + v + -ing
sentences, (6) and (8) as conveying duration, in conformity with the prevailing gram-
matical rule. In both cases, the Arabic end-product was a mistranslation. Only when
the textual and contextual factors were provided were valid translations collectively
negotiated and produced. In (5), someone waiting for her turn wanted to know how
many people have had a bath (information seeking strategy), whereas in (6),
the question was about one particular person who had left the bathroom in
an awful mess (attitude of the speaker). The key to understand and properly translate
(8) is the anaphoric value of the adverb more and more.
The Speaker/Writer: A Fundamental Role in Language Not

Reflected in Pedagogical Grammar
Disregard of the context of language production and reception in traditional, descrip-

tive, and even typological approaches to language has made the speaker the big
absentee from pedagogical grammar. The main factors at the origin of language
production, especially the speaker/writer, are not taken into account because both
approaches envisage not language at work, but language as an end-product. Yet,
speakers engage different strategies of (in) visibility in the language they use for
communication and expression. They “choose to intervene in language by marking
their attitude toward a propositional content or a grammatical subject. That inter-
vention is encoded on the surface of the sentence in visible traces, called modal
or authorial visibility markers. In a detached strategy, the speaker uses language to
state a fact in affirmative, negative, or interrogative terms, i.e., by validating what
s/he says as true or false, or by allowing the addressee to take the decision. A perti-
nent example from Arabic is the system of negation. The six negators, laa, lan,
lam, maa, lammaa, and leisa do not function as time locators of the predicative
relation, as held by traditional and modern grammarians. Rather, they constitute a
micro-system of interrelated units governed by an enunciative logic associated with
the intervention-detachment strategies of the speaker (Kahlaoui, 2019). In English,
descriptive grammarians have assigned modal markers different semantic values,

such as obligation, recommendation, and ability, mixing up grammar and the actual
events of the world. Modals, in fact, are far too complex to be approached outside
their context of production and reception. It appears quite clearly that the prescriptive
and descriptive approaches are too ill-equipped to reveal the metalinguistic status of
modal markers as observable traces of an underlying processing activity.
The Monolingual Bias
What is paradoxical about theoretical linguistics is that the broadness of its aim
to account for the working of human language is discordant with the narrow-
ness of the approach used by linguists and grammarians who investigate individual
languages in isolation, preventing any insight into the working of natural languages.
This is reflected in language pedagogy and particularly in present-day predomi-
nantly monolingual reference grammars which seem to emphasize the diversity of
human languages, not their essential unity. A fundamental assumption underlying
modern linguistic thought (Chomsky, 2000; Greenberg, 1976, 1978) is that human
languages, a species specificity, are superficially diverse, but they share some funda-
mental phonological, morpho-syntactic, semantic, and even pragmatic similarities
(Habermas, 1976). In grammar, these similarities are detectable principally in opera-
tions, assumed common to natural languages, like negation, modality, interrogation,
and reference to time, aspect and number, etc., which languages exhibit at their
surfaces in very different ways. Examples include negation in Arabic which is, as
seen above, conveyed by at least six formal negators compared with only one in
English (not); reference to time is codified in three tenses in Arabic and eight in
English., sentence expansion is a structural feature of human languages, but it varies
considerably from one language to another, etc. Including an explicative contrastive
component in pedagogical grammar, instead of perpetuating static binaries between
languages, would enable students to gain enriching insight into the working of
natural languages, and enhance their interlingual competence and metalinguistic
awareness. In translator education, a grammar tailored to the needs of prospective
translators is a didactic necessity, not just an option, as the prevailing monolingual
and rule-based paradigm has almost nothing to offer to a student translator over-
whelmed by the structural and rhetorical intricacies associated with languages of
distant origins, like English and Arabic. To be effectively exercised, contrastivity
should be conducted intra- and interlingually. Comparable grammatical markers
such as too/also, nearly/almost, shall/will, as if/as though, this/that, ’inna/laqad,
lam/maa, sa-/sawfa, etc. should be explored systematically before extending the
scope of contrastivity to the target language.
Translation Problems Related to Aspect in English

and Arabic
In descriptive grammar (Leech & Svartvik, 2002; Quirk and Greenbaum, 1976, 2016;
Azar & Hagen, 2011), aspect “concerns the manner in which the verbal action is expe-
rienced or regarded (for example as completed or in progress)” (Quirk & Greenbaum,
1976, 40). Thus, the progressive aspect is said to indicate limited duration, incom-
pleteness, and “habitual action, conveying emotional coloring such as irritation”
(Quirk and Greenbaum 41). Leech (1989, 18–34) suggests 14 “meanings” of be + v
+ -ing (Table 7.2):
The perfective is at work when the action is seen as having taken place over a
period extending up to the present or relating only to the past; it is associated either
with the present (perfect) or the past (perfect) (Quirk and Greenbaum, 43–45). In the
demonstration, made-up sentences with no reference value are used:
(9) Normally he lives in London but at present he is living in Boston.
(10) While I was writing, the phone rang.
(11) I have worked for an hour.
(12) John had lived in Paris for ten years.
First, these “explanations,” especially Leech’s, are neither teachable nor learnable;
they demonstrate the trouble of the grammarian when they approach language out
of context, and they allude to the student’s perplexity regarding rules like “stative
Table 7.2 Leech’s 14 meaning of (be + v + -ing)

Semantic value Example
1 Temporary situations She’s cooking the dinner
2 Unlimited duration My watch is working perfectly
3 Limited duration I am raising my arm
4 Incompleteness of the event The man was drowning
5 Lack of commitment I am hoping you will give us some advice
6 Emphasis on the process I am hearing you clearly
7 A request which will put the listener to I was wondering if you would give us some
considerable risk or inconvenience advice
8 Temporariness She’s being awkward
9 Stative verbs which are no longer state Resemble = to become like
verbs
10 Fairly recent communicative happenings Albert was saying that coal prices are going up
11 Habitual use The trains are arriving late practically every
day this winter
12 Repetition of events of limited duration- Don’t call them at 7.30—they’re usually
having dinner
13 Anticipated happening in the future We are visiting Aunt Rose tomorrow
14 Persistent activity I am continually forgetting people’s names
verbs which are no longer state verbs” and “a request which will put the listener to
considerable risk or inconvenience,” which reflect a flagrant confusion of language
and the world. Unlike lexical items, such structural constructs as be + v + -ing and
have/had + v + ed have no referents in the world. In language, there are forms,
relations, and patterns, not actions, habits, or irritation; these are mere semantic
effects. Second, the simplicity and artificiality of the examples provided conflict
with the complexity of real-life language and would be of no avail to learners and
translators in contexts where sentences invalidate the grammatical rule, or when they
are confronted to not easily decodable pairs like:
(13) When tobacco companies sell cigarettes to teenagers they are selling them
poison.
(14) Who’s slept in my room? versus
(15) Who’s been sleeping in my room?
(16) This girl is always knowing something she’s not supposed!
(17) – What time is it, please?—Let me check… It’s nearly seven.
(18) – John! Get up, it’s almost seven. You’re going to be late!
(19) Is he up yet? versus
(20) Is he up already?
None of the above-mentioned semantic values attributed to the so-called “pro-
gressive form” could be a valid explanation of the emergence of be + v + -ing in
the second clause of (13) or of (v-s) in the first clause. Anaphora is the trigger of are
selling, which codifies the attitude of the speaker. There is no action to be described as
making headway in the extralinguistic; there is a speaker, also termed as the linguistic
subject (Ls ), making a judgement about the grammatical subject they. While clause 2
is subject-oriented, (S ← Predicate), clause 1 is oriented toward the object (S → Pred-
icate), the main piece of information. The major role is assumed in the first clause by
the grammatical subject (Gs ), and by the linguistic subject (Ls ) in the second clause.
The main difference between the first and the second clause is that the first has a
referential status, and the second, codifying the speaker’s processing strategy, has a
metalinguistic status. The same logic applies to (14)–(16). In (14), the utterance is
governed by an information deficit (the speaker simply wants to know who slept in
the room, X or Y), while (15) has no information value; a possible context is when
the speaker, unhappy about the mess left in his bedroom during his absence, wants
to be given the name of the “culprit.” (16) is a case where the working of language in
natural contexts invalidates the grammatical rule. The descriptive aspectual theory
collapses completely when a stative verb like know in (16), not to mention be, forget,
love, belong, hear, want, etc., combines perfectly well with be + v + -ing. The stative
verb know, conventionally categorized as incompatible with the “progressive form,”
confirms that this form is not the monopoly of action or process verbs and, that asso-
ciating a formal category with an action taking place outside language is untenable.
For Adamczewski (2002), also actions involving duration can be conveyed without
using be + v + -ing:
(21) And now the Queen walks to the throne. (context: coronation of Queen
Elizabeth II)
(22) Inch by inch he opened the entrance door.

(23) This game takes a dramatic turn! (sports commentary)
The key to understanding (16) is the emphasis placed on “always” which conveys
a judgement on the Grammatical subject. Quirk and Greenbaum invoke a “state of
irritation” to account for the use of be + v + -ing, but “irritation” is associated
with the accentuated’always, not with the formal construct. The difference between
nearly/almost in (17) and (18) is not treated in pedagogical grammar. These approx-
imators, like kaada/ and ‘awshaka/ in Arabic, are considered in free variation.
As they will be explored in the next section, I would just say that a comparison
between the two utterances shows that nearly is not possible in the context of (18)
and questions the assumption of interchangeability. If for the native speaker (19) and
(20) pose no problem of understanding, the difference between yet and already is
not always evident for the translator from Arabic and into English, particularly when
the grammar textbook prescribes that sentences like Haven’t you seen him already?
and Haven’t you seen him yet? should both be understood as “Haven’t you by this
time seen him?” (Quirk & Greenbaum, 1976, p. 238). For Leech, “Already, still, yet,
and before occur with the Present Perfect in the sense ‘as early a snow’, ‘as late as
now’, etc.” (Leech, 1989, p. 47). Such oversimplification would not be of any help
to the student translator, and may even lead to overgeneralization.
Aspect in Arabic Language and Pedagogical Grammar
Arabic traditional grammar has dominated the grammatical landscape for centuries,
and it continues to exercise unquestionable authority in pedagogical grammar which
is still indifferent to the findings of post-Saussurean linguistic research. The theoret-
ical work of the few linguists who distanced themselves from traditional approaches
to grammar (Hassaan, 1966; Furaiha, 1981; Makhzumi, 1986; Al Fassi & Al Fehri,
1989) has not been translated into a pedagogical version and, therefore, remains
beyond the reach of undergraduate students. Although Arabic is a highly aspectual-
izing language, aspect is totally absent from Arabic pedagogical grammar, simply
because it is not researched by traditional grammarians whose approach to the verb
system is restricted to reference to time, the form fa‘ala for the past and yaf‘alu
for the present and future times. Most Semitists, however, consider these forms
as conveyors of an aspectual not a temporal meaning (Cohen, 1924; Fleisch, 1974;
Wright, 1974). Drawing on different theoretical models, Hassan (1966), Al Fassi and
Al Fehri (1989), and Zanned (2011) have suggested several aspectual and temporal
taxonomies associated with the verb which is treated as conveyor of both aspect and
reference to time. Hassan, for instance, identifies 16 aspectual values, nine associated
with reference to the past time, three with the present, and four with the future. In
such a disempowering didactic context where aspect is mis-defined in the grammar of
English and totally absent from Arabic pedagogical grammar, what is expected from
an ill-equipped student translator, often struggling with complex verbal constructs,

such as have + been + v + -ing, in (15)?
However, close observation of written Arabic reveals that aspect, the way the
verbal event is seen from the speaker’s perspective as finished, unfinished, continuing,
etc., is a prolific grammatical operation codified in at least five categories conveying
multiple event-related values, as shown in the Table 7.3. In the absence of context,
the translations suggested are just approximations of the value conveyed by the unit
(the list of aspectual markers, especially lexical verbs, is far from comprehensive).
The Risk of Translating Arabic Aspect without Any

Grammatical Input
The detrimental effect of the gap between pedagogical grammars and the working
of both languages has in fact been confirmed by the weak performance of a group of
45 upper intermediate students assigned two aspect-related in-class tasks. The first
task is to attempt an explanation, in English or Arabic, of the difference(s) between
five semantically-related Arabic sentences including the same propositional content
He/work hard and honestly, but with five different aspectual markers. (1f) and (1g)
were first given out of context, then contextual elements were provided. The second
task was to attempt a translation into Arabic of a small corpus of contextualized
English sentences including two oppositions: v-s versus be + v + -ing and have +
v-ed 2 vs. have + been + v-ing.
Task (1): Intralingual Contrastivity
Arabic English
(1a) (He)—maa zaala—works hard and honestly
(1b) (He)—d.halla—works hard and honestly
(1c) (He)—maa fati’a—works hard and honestly
(1d) (He)—ma-n-fakka—works hard and

honestly
(1e) (He)—ma barih.a—works hard and honestly
(1f) The train -’awshaka—to arrive. (few

minutes and we leave everything behind)
(continued)
(continued)
Arabic English
(1g) The train—kaada—to arrive. (were it not for
that fateful accident)
The data elicited from task one is interesting and predictable. Interesting, because
they indicate that the 45 respondents are not able to discriminate between the aspec-
tual markers in (1a)–(1e). Maa zaala, d.halla, maa fati’a, ma barih.a, and ma-n-fakka
are understood as conveying continuation of the verbal event, which implies that
they are interchangeable and interlingually reducible into one English translation He
is still working hard and honestly. The data is also predictable because the students’
responses correspond to the explanation provided in the Arabic monolingual dictio-
naries where d.halla, maa fati’a, ma barih.a and ma-n-fakka are said to convey the
same meaning as maa zaala, still in English. In pedagogical grammar, these auxil-
iaries are treated only from a declensional perspective. Like the verb kaana which
denotes existence in the past, they require the nominative case on the Subject and the
accusative case on the Predicate. Nothing is said about their raison d’être in Arabic.
Even in quite recent reference grammars of Arabic (Ryding, 2008; Badawi et al.,
2004), these auxiliaries are assigned the same function, to indicate continuation of
the verbal action, in direct contradiction with the principle of language economy.
The same comment applies to another set of aspectual verbs generally defined as
indicators of becoming,’as.bah.a, s.aara, ’amsaa, and baata. The focus, once
again, is on their declensional properties, not on how they work in language use.
Similarly, pedagogical English grammar has been too attached to the linearity of
the surface to account for the differences between related pairs, often understood
by language learners and translators as substitutable, like nearly/almost, as if/as
though, too/also, shall/will, under/below, still/yet, etc. (Adamczewski, 2002, 42;
Adamczewski & Gabilan, 1996). The need for a corpus-based explicative approach
to grammar capable of elucidating how aspectual, modal, and temporal markers
work in discourse, and where they intersect or diverge, is a pedagogical imperative.
Present day reference grammars have been insensitive not only to the working of
language but also to the epistemic changes in post-structuralist linguistics, reducing
the grammar course to monotonous exercises created to confirm a memorizable rule,
not to account for the working of language.
(1f) and (1g) include two verbs,’awshaka and kaada, conventionally defined as
verbs of approximation without any specification about their distinctive features. As
mentioned above, students were first given this pair out of context and asked to differ-
entiate between them. Once again, all the students failed to discriminate between the
two sentences. Approximation was reiterated as the core meaning of’awshaka and
kaada. In the second phase, the same sentences were provided with contextual clues
added between parentheses; the students were asked whether or not (1f) and (1g)
should be understood as interchangeable. Answers improved considerably: all the
Table 7.3 Aspectual categories, markers, and values in Arabic

Aspectual Aspectual markers Aspectual Approximate English translationor
categories values example
1 Morphological fa ‘ala Perfective
template
yaf ‘alu Imperfective
fa “ala Intensive
’infa ‘ala Reflexivity
’if ‘aw ‘ala Process
’if ‘aalla Transformation
’if ‘alla Transformation
’af ‘ala Resultative
istaf ‘ala Transformation
2 Auxiliaries d.halla Continuation Remained, kept on

(metaverbs) maazaala Durability To still be, to continue to be
ma-n-fakka Continuation Not to stop
maa fati’a Continuation Not to cease
maa barih.a Continuation Remained, kept on
maa labitha Inchoative Did not tarry
kaada Approximation Almost
’awshaka Nearness On the point of
3 Formal marker (la)qad Perfective The perfect aspect
Lammaa Perfective Not … yet
qaida Incompleteness In the process of, is/was being
4 Lexical verbs ’as.bah.a Transformation (Has) become
daama Durability Lasted
’amsaa Becoming (Has) become
da’aba Habit Accustomed
’ansha’a Inchoative Started
inkabba Inchoative Was engaged in
istahalla Inchoative Began
daawama Continuation Did something regularly
istamarra Continuation Continued to
(continued)
Table 7.3 (continued)

Aspectual Aspectual markers Aspectual Approximate English translationor
categories values example
shaarafa Nearness Was close to
naahaza Nearness Was close to
qaaraba Nearness Drew near
Becoming (Has) become
h.aana Nearness Drew near

ista’nafa Resumptive Resumed
faraḡha min Termination (Has) completed, finalized
ta’ahhaba Inchoative Got ready
5 Phrase ‘alaa washaki Approximation About to
‘alaa’uhbati Inchoative Ready to

bis.adadi ara> Incompleteness Ongoing
fii d.hilli Incompleteness Amid, under, in the middle of
students considered that “(1g) means that the train is about to arrive” and 37 consid-
ered that “the train not arrive” in (1f), while for three respondents “arrival” was
imminent.
I have shown in a previous paper (Kahlaoui, 2010) that’awshaka and kaada are
aspectual verbs which convey the generic idea of approximation, but with a very
important distinction that explains why (1f) and (1g) are not in free variation. (1f) is
a possible answer to someone seeking to know when the train is expected to arrive,
which means that’awshaka implies a prospective validation of the predicative relation
(the train/arrive) and introduces an open relation [R[(arrival is imminent), whereas
kaada encodes the non-validity of the predicative relation in the context of the past
and introduces a closed relation [R] (arrival is no more expected). This is confirmed
by many examples where kaada is possible and’awshaka is not valid.
– Kaada-l-mu‘allimu’an yakuuna rasuulan./
The teacher could have been a (god’s) messenger (of a status almost as high as
that of a messenger).
– Kaada-l-faqru’an yakuuna kufran./
Poverty is tantamount to blasphemy.
– Kaada-l-muriibu’an yaquula k.hd.uunii!/
Assailed by self-doubt, he almost pleaded guilty.
Idiomatic translation: A guilty conscience needs no accuser.
In the following examples with’awshaka, kaada is not possible:
– ’awshaka maw‘idu-l- mu’tamari./ /The conference is drawing near.
– Laqad’awshakat ‘ala-t-ta k.harruji, lam yatabaqqa siwaa ik.htibaarun waah.idun.
She’s about to graduate, only one more exam to go!

– ’awshaka-s-s.aifu ’an yanqadii./. /Summer is nearly over.
ˆ
All these counter examples confirm that approximation alone does not explain
how these aspectual verbs work or how they should be translated. It is note-
worthy that the pair nearly/almost in English is governed by the same logic under-
lying’awshaka/kaada in Arabic, and presque/quasiment in French. The first items of
these pairs announce a prospective validation of the predicative relation unlike the
second items which have a different status and they announce a closed relation, as
demonstrated in the following English pair:
– A: What time is it, please?/
B: Let me check… It’s nearly seven./
– John! Get up, it’s almost seven. You’re going to be late!
If in the first sentence with nearly the strategy at work is informative, the speaker
is just telling the time. This is not the case of the sentence with almost where the
speaker announces the arrival of a predetermined time, the unavoidable waking up
time, already known to the addressee. She is telling a time, not the time. Like kaada,
almost announces a closed predicative relation.
Task 2: Translating English Aspect into Arabic
As mentioned above, in task 2, the same group was asked to attempt a translation
into Arabic of a small corpus of contextualized English sentences including two
oppositions: v-s versus be + v + -ing and have + v-ed 2 versus have + been + v-ing.
(a) I know, you hear Mozart and you like Picasso.
(b) – I think I’ve heard Peter.
– You are hearing voices!
(c) My parents don’t eat much at night.
(d) The house is quiet. My father sits in the spare room smoking and my mother
sits in the bedroom smoking. They are not eating much.
(e) You’ve already seen The Irishman, haven’t you?
(f) You’ve been seeing too many films!
The task, this time, is to translate into Arabic three sentence pairs including three
verbal oppositions:
– hear versus are hearing
– don’t eat versus are not eating
– have done versus have been doing

Table 7.4 shows the results of task 2.
Guided by the prevailing grammatical rule which defines be + v + -ing, the form
used in the three pairs above, as referring to an event in progress (the progressive
form), most respondents (96.8%) managed to translate the first sentence of each pair,
i.e., those not including be + v + -ing, quite effectively with few under-translations
(2.9%), whereas the second sentence of each pair, those with be + v + -ing, were
mostly mistranslated (94.6%), with very few under-translations (1.3%). Student
translations reflect a semantic conception of be + v + -ing, which is often translated
by the addition of temporal adverbs (’al’aana/ /now) or aspectual phrases
(bis.adadi/ /in the process of). Thus, the reply You are hearing voices! was
approached and translated as an event happening at the time of speech (You hear
voices/ ), (You are now hearing voices/ ), or (You
do hear voices./ ). It is clear that no one understood that the speaker,
in light of what she knows about the addressee, is passing a judgement about the
addressee (gloss: You are just having visions, as usual).
be + v + -ing, is, in fact, an indicator of speaker visibility in discourse. Whenever
speakers engage intervenient strategies, as in passing a judgement, their intervention
is encoded in surface traces like modal markers, be + v + -ing, the emphatic do,
‘inna , sa-awfa and the negator lan . The predicative binary relation [S–P]
(You/hearing voices) is endorsed by the linguistic subject, and the utterance refers
to a speaker’s processing strategy, not to an event in the extralinguistic, hence the
metalinguistic nature of the metaoperator be + v + -ing. In (a), the utterance I know,
you hear Mozart and you like Picasso, the speaker, engaging a detached strategy,
states a fact about the addressee. The structure of (a) is ternary: [S–V–O] and the
value conveyed is referential, not metalinguistic.
The pair (c) and (d) introduces an interesting opposition: My parents don’t eat
much at night and They are not eating much. In (c), the adverbial phrase (at night)
is the major piece of information (gloss: they are in the habit of not eating much
at night); not eating much is applicable to dinner, but not to lunch for instance, as
this would make the be + v + -ing incompatible with the context of information.
Whereas in (d) the simple present don’t eat is not possible because the speaker
is commenting on the parents’ conjugal life and how it has come to be. Eating,
therefore, is used in connotation, not in denotation like in (c). The non-felicitous
Arabic translation produced by most respondents /They don’t eat much.
reflects a semantic conception conventionally associated with be + v + -ing, as
referring to a real event outside language. In less theoretical terms, we can say that
with (d) the speaker comments on the life of her parents, while in (c), the speaker
provides new information about the parents who are in the habit of not eating much
at night. There is nothing in (c) which tells that the conjugal life of the parents is
in trouble, nor is there anything in (d) which tells that the parents are on a diet, for
instance.
Table 7.4 Task 2 results
Sentences without be + v + -ing Sentences with be + v + -ing
Sentence Effectively translated Under-translated Mis-translated Sentence Effectively translated Under-translated Mistranslated
(a) 45 0 0 (b) 2 0 43
(c) 44 1 0 (d) 0 0 45
(e) 42 3 0 (f) 2 3 40
Average 96.8% 2.9% 0 Average 3.5% 1.3 94.6
7 Student Translators Between Pedagogical Grammars and Language …
111
The last pair, (e) and (f), introduces the complex aspect-tense combination have
+ been + v + -ing as opposed to have + V ed2 . What may complicate the task of
the student translator is the absence of a one-to-one equivalence in Arabic for the
primary auxiliaries have and be, and the nominalizing marker—ing, along with the
unclear status of aspect in Arabic pedagogical grammar. Out of context, (f) was
mistranslated by most students. Seemingly, the source sentence was understood as
a past event extending up to the present time, in conformity with the rule which
associates progression with have + been + v + -ing: “We use the present perfect
continuous for an activity that has recently stopped or just stopped” (Murphy, 2004,
18). Thus, it was translated as a real event (seeing movies):
– Laqad kunta tushaahidu’aflaaman kathiiratan/
The Arabic translation refers to a real event in the past, whereas the meaning of (f)
is entirely different; the speaker says that the addressee has a “fertile” imagination,
which is a judgement not a piece of information. However, when the students were
later given the context of the utterance, their translations improved radically. Many
of them even attempted an idiomatic translation, such as
– Haadaa faqat. min wah.yi k.hayaalika-l-k.his.bi!/
¯
Literally: This is but a revelation of your fertile imagination!
Similar utterances with have + been + v + -ing were given in class for translation
into Arabic, first out of context, then in their context of production/reception. The
result confirms the need for language teachers to refrain from using artificial and
contextless sentences to demonstrate the validity of a grammatical rule.
A confirmation-seeking strategy underlies (e) You’ve already seen The Irishman,
haven’t you? The sentence has a referential status (seeing a real movie) and is oriented
to the object, the main piece of information. Most students produced a felicitous
Arabic translation, using the aspectual marker laqad/ and the past form of the verb:
– “The Irishman” /You’ve seen The Irishman, haven’t you?
Conclusion: Toward an Explicative Contrastive Grammar

Tailored to the Needs of Prospective Translators
Direct observation of translation classes, from different cohorts and over many years,
confirms that for most student translators, translation difficulties are often associated
with the way the source text meaning is constructed, rather than with meaning itself,
which is often less problematic. These difficulties arise when students fail to identify
the value conveyed by an ill-defined formal grammatical category; when nothing
in grammar textbooks is said about the logic of sentence expansion in the source
language compared with that of the target language; when a verb conventionally
defined as incompatible with the so-called progressive form emerges in that very form
in a ST unit; when negation is exteriorized in one negator in English and in at least
six in Arabic, with no available explanation in pedagogical grammar or in theoretical

syntax; when Arabic in use reflects a highly aspectual language and aspect is strik-
ingly absent from reference grammars, etc. These and many other issues are left to
the discretion of teachers, who themselves learned grammar at school and university
in ways which do not differ substantially from how their students are taught grammar
today, at least in many EFL contexts. Descriptive pedagogical grammar no longer
corresponds to present views on language, with the advent of performance-related
disciplines, such as discourse analysis, pragmatics, text linguistics, and corpus-
linguistics, which have contributed to a better understanding of language in use.
The descriptive approach is not the appropriate framework for teaching because it
approaches language out of context and from a monolingual perspective, while trans-
lation is a context-based bilingual process. Moreover, what is described is the surface
end-product, whereas the linearity of the observable or audible surface does not
always reflect how an utterance is processed in a particular context. Only an explica-
tive and context-based contrastive grammar, tailored to the needs of prospective trans-
lators, is in a position to facilitate the task of translation students and provide plausible
answers to their questions regarding grammatical operations, structures, and values
at work in written and spoken discourse. To be effective, contrastivity should be
intra- and interlingual with a focus on the grammatical non-substitutable opposi-
tions in and between languages. These functionally-related oppositions inherent to
natural languages, such as shall/will, may/can, nearly/almost, sa-/sawfa,’inna/laqad,
, are governed by a logic associated with the structuring activity of the
speaker/writer in a given context. Such translation-oriented intra- and interlingual
contrastivity should also be extended to domains, like morphology, sense relations,
and pragmatics.
Regrettably, the linguistic subject which is at the origin of the utterance is
still absent from the major dominant reference grammars of English and Arabic.
Finally, explicative contrastivity would develop the translator’s analytical potential
and enhance their metalinguistic awareness, beyond the static interlingual binaries
perpetuated in conventional translator education and training.
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Chapter 8
Incorporating Intercultural Competence
into EFL Classrooms: The Case
of Japanese Higher Education
Institutions
Ana Sofia Hofmeyr
Abstract As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, Japanese universi-

ties compete fiercely to foster globally competent human resources who are able to
boost Japan’s economic competitiveness internationally. English proficiency, espe-
cially related to varieties from inner circle countries, is perceived as fundamental to
building a bridge between Japan and other nations. As a result, English as a Foreign
Language (EFL) education is placed at the center of internationalization policies at
the tertiary level. Yet, while the relationship between language and culture is well-
documented, intercultural competence development remains largely disconnected
from the EFL curriculum at Japanese higher education institutions. This chapter will
first discuss the impact of internationalization strategies on foreign language educa-
tion at Japanese universities. Second, the author will explore various approaches to
integrating intercultural competence into EFL classrooms, namely by moving beyond
superficial content, integrating affective and behavioral components into classes, and
developing a sense of global citizenship in students through UNESCO’s sustain-
able development goals. Finally, the author will discuss some of the internal and
external challenges faced by this approach in Japan, including inflexible perceptions
of national identity, a lack of intercultural training for teachers, and native-speakerism
as a goal.
Keywords Intercultural competence · Internationalization · English as a Foreign

Language · Higher education · Intercultural training
Introduction
Globalization trends, greater interconnectedness, and a knowledge-based economy

have significantly increased the frequency of intercultural contact, leading to a greater
demand for graduates capable of acting and interacting beyond national borders and
familiar cultural paradigms. This socio-economic transition has also solidified the
A. S. Hofmeyr (B)
Kansai University, Suita, Japan
e-mail: hofmeyr@kansai-u.ac.jp
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_8
116 A. S. Hofmeyr
role of English as the de facto language of international communication, further

emphasizing the need not only for intercultural competence but also for foreign
language proficiency, and reinforcing the complex connection between the two.
The transition to a knowledge-based economy has also shifted the role of educa-
tional institutions, particularly at the tertiary level, toward future-oriented outcomes.
Through the funding and implementation of internationalization strategies, universi-
ties worldwide are often tasked with educating a global workforce, capable of driving
economic development and innovation, and of working internationally. A key interna-
tionalization strategy has thus been to expose students to foreign language education
as well to knowledge about and people from other cultures. Among foreign languages,
English, as the main international language of business communication, is perceived
by educational stakeholders and parents alike as the main route to economic success,
boosting the demand for English language education.
The relationship between language and culture is well-documented—not only
does language acquisition shape cultural views, but culture also influences language
development. Jackson (2020, 29) elaborates, “It is through enculturation, the process
of language and cultural socialization, that our primary cultural beliefs, values,
rules of behavior, and worldviews are learned and internalized to varying degrees.”
Accordingly, the potential for intercultural competence development through foreign
language education is immense. Internationalization strategies have traditionally
emphasized the role of study abroad programs in the development of both foreign
language skills and intercultural knowledge. However, challenges posed by an overall
low percentage of mobile students (Agnew & Kahn, 2014) and, more recently, a
global pandemic have forced educational institutions around the world to rethink
ways in which to provide students with intercultural skills on domestic campuses.
In Japan, universities compete fiercely to foster global jinzai i.e., globally compe-
tent human resources, able to increase the economic competitiveness of Japan.
Foreign language education, nearly synonymous with English as a Foreign Language
(EFL) education in Japan, is placed by the government at the core of internationaliza-
tion policies. Yet, intercultural competence development remains disconnected from
the EFL curriculum, with Japanese government and educational institutions focusing
largely on linguistic proficiency, particularly with respect to English varieties from
inner circle countries, while overlooking other intercultural skills. This chapter aims
to discuss the impact of internationalization strategies on foreign language education
at Japanese universities, the ways in which intercultural competence can be integrated
into EFL classrooms, and the internal and external challenges faced by this approach
in Japan.
Internationalization and EFL Education in Japan
With the expansion of the knowledge economy and globalization trends in the late
twentieth century, the internationalization of universities worldwide moved from the
periphery to the core of institutional interest (Brandenburg & de Wit, 2011). In Japan,
8 Incorporating Intercultural Competence into EFL Classrooms … 117
the debate surrounding internationalization gained track in the 1980s, particularly as

the means to expand the economic market while coping with the strain caused by
an aging population (Yonezawa, 2014). The perception of internationalization as a
solution to demographic and economic challenges rather than to institutional devel-
opment effectively placed the core of internationalization efforts on the government,
creating a unique top-down approach led by the Japanese Ministry of Education,
Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).
Internationalization policies at the tertiary level promoted and funded by MEXT
have been chiefly two-pronged. On the one hand, MEXT has aimed to attract overseas
top talent to Japan by recruiting large numbers of international students to study
alongside local students, through initiatives such as the “The International Student
100,000 Plan,” proposed in 1983, and the follow-up “300,000 Foreign Students Plan,”
proposed in 2008. The recruited international students serve a double purpose—not
only do they act as globally competent human resources and as a bridge between
Japan and overseas countries, but they also provide Japanese students with greater
exposure to diverse cultures, ultimately cultivating a domestic workforce able to
work internationally and to deal with complex global challenges.
On the other hand, the government has aimed to reform top-tier universities from
within through the funding of large internationalization programs, such as the Global
30 (2009–2014) and the succeeding Top Global University Project (2014–2023).
These initiatives, aimed at fostering top graduates with global skills, have been
guided largely by quantitative targets, many of which emphasize foreign language
education, in general, and English language skills, in particular. The ongoing Top
Global University Project, for instance, is guided by goals of an upturn in the number
of Japanese students sent abroad, the number of courses provided exclusively in
a foreign language, the number of students enrolled in degree courses conducted
in foreign languages, and the number of students proficient in foreign languages
(MEXT, 2017), the latter being commonly measured through standardized tests with
numerical scores. The emphasis placed on foreign languages, specifically English,
both at-home and abroad, places EFL education at the core of the internationalization
process of tertiary institutions.
The importance attached by MEXT to English language education in Japan is
clear even if controversial (Hashimoto, 2009). All Japanese students take six years
of English at the secondary level, in addition to two years in grades 5 and 6 of elemen-
tary school as of 2020, when reforms implemented by MEXT extended compulsory
English language education. When combining primary and secondary EFL educa-
tion to the two additional years required by most universities regardless of major and
specialization, Japanese students at the higher education level will generally have
spent eight to ten years learning English in efforts to emerge as human resources
able to compete in the global market.
Yet, EFL education in Japan faces criticism from several fronts. Supporters of the
importance of learning English protest against the historical emphasis on grammar
and translation as opposed to the communicative skills needed for international busi-
ness, as well as of a general state of inertia affecting the implementation of effective
118 A. S. Hofmeyr
changes to the curriculum. They maintain, not without merit, that despite the provi-
sion of EFL education from elementary school, Japanese students often graduate
high school without being able to communicate in English (Inuzuka, 2017). In addi-
tion, they defend that the widespread emphasis placed on standardized tests, such as
the Eiken Test in Practical English Proficiency (Eiken) and the Test of English as a
Foreign Language (TOEFL) as measures of proficiency, not only reinforce a focus on
passive skills over communicative ability but also limit the varieties of English that
students are exposed to, in stark contrast with the broad range they might encounter
in professional settings.
On the other hand, as discussed by Aspinall (2011), critics of EFL education
emphasize that it strengthens not only the hegemony of English as a lingua franca
over Japanese as a national language, but also the hegemony of Western values over
the Japanese national identity, particularly when introduced from a young age. These
concerns are further fuelled by an EFL curriculum that, rather than English as an
international language of communication and business, strongly favors linguistic and
cultural education associated with countries in the inner circle, particularly the United
States, which exerts strong economic, political, and soft power at a global level.
Such concerns continue to empower advocates of the translation method, historically
popular in Japan, which allows students to preserve a sense of national identity to a
greater extent by binding foreign language education to the use of one’s own national
language and culture.
Anxiety over the potential weakening of national identity is also reflected on
MEXT’s policy documents, which suggest a need for maintaining a sense of “Japane-
seness” (Hofmeyr, 2021), and on the goals set by universities receiving funding to
internationalize by MEXT, who see English as a means to export Japanese culture
worldwide rather than as a path to multiculturalism in Japan. Overall, EFL education
in Japan is caught between two forces pulling in conflicting directions. As Aspinall
(2011, 129) clearly summarizes, “Intermixed with a practical discussion about the
best ways to help Japanese children learn a difficult subject like English, therefore,
lies an ongoing debate about how notions of “Japaneseness” can withstand external
challenges while still allowing the nation to prosper as a global economic power.”
Foreign Language and/or Culture
In view of the debate surrounding English education and national identity, we must
ask—what are the consequences of this debate to the development of interculturally
competent human resources at the higher education level in Japan? Fantini (2020)
identifies three domains of intercultural communicative competence, which are inti-
mately linked to the role of global human resources in Japan: the ability to create and
maintain relationships, the ability to communicate with minimal distortion, and the
ability to collaborate toward common goals. In reality, however, despite the Japanese
government’s demand for human resources able to work interculturally, as well as
the intimate relationship between language and culture, EFL education in Japan
suffers from a disconnect between notions of language proficiency and intercultural

competence development, evident at both the policy and the implementation levels.
An analysis of policy and promotional documents published by the Japanese
government and the 37 universities in the ongoing Top Global University Project
conducted by Hofmeyr (2021) found that globally competent human resources are
largely promoted in terms of seven attitudes and skills: leadership skills, special-
ized knowledge, problem-solving skills, an understanding of other’s worldviews,
openness, foreign language communicative skills (in general), and English commu-
nicative skills (in particular). Many of these components, such as leadership and
problem-solving skills, are clearly related to a perceived need for Japan to boost its
economic competitiveness in global markets and to cooperate in addressing global
issues. This is further supported by the emphasis placed on communication in foreign
languages, preferably English, as it allows for Japan to expand internationally.
By contrast, the same study revealed that documents published by both the govern-
ment and the universities tended to downplay the role of in-depth cultural under-
standing in favor of a strong sense of Japanese national identity. These findings
suggest a continuation of Japan’s historical approach to contact with other cultures,
which separates language and culture in efforts to maintain Japanese national identity
“intact” by promoting the assimilation of relevant cultural knowledge while rejecting
multiculturalism as an egalitarian co-existence of cultures (Inuzuka, 2017).
The gap between language and culture found in governmental and institutional
rhetoric is also noticeable at the implementation level. In order to measure English
language proficiency, Japanese educational institutions rely heavily on standardized
tests from a young age, with MEXT setting benchmarks for the Eiken in junior
high school and high school, and for the TOEFL at the tertiary level. Yet, these
tests that set goals for the secondary and tertiary EFL curriculum, along with the
Common Examination for University Admission, rely largely on multiple-choice
questions, assessing mainly receptive linguistic skills (Allen, 2020) and overlooking
intercultural competence.
As a result, these tests, which are administered nationwide and allegedly aim to
determine whether students are in the path to become globally competent human
resources, effectively narrow the ability to interact interculturally to students’
reading, listening, and grammar translation skills. Ultimately, this approach, over-
looking the importance of intercultural skills beyond linguistic proficiency, has real
implications to both secondary and post-secondary EFL education. It creates a gap in
an EFL curriculum that remains geared toward preparing students to pass standard-
ized tests, leading to the poor integration of additional intercultural dimensions into
internationalization strategies at the higher education level despite their importance
to successful interaction in the global arena.
120 A. S. Hofmeyr
Integrating Intercultural Competence into the EFL

Curriculum
While study abroad programs have generally been favored worldwide as the gateway
to foreign language proficiency and cultural awareness, a domestic dimension of
internationalization that emerged in the 1990s has gained track since the 2000s.
Beelen and Jones (2015, 69) defined internationalization-at-home as “the purposeful
integration of international and intercultural dimensions into the formal and informal
curriculum for all students within domestic learning environments,” thus suggesting
that intercultural competence can be fostered on domestic campuses, beyond study
abroad programs.
In Japan, by contrast, study abroad programs have been perceived until very
recently, when the global coronavirus pandemic led to restrictions in international
travel, as the main gateway for university students to experience and learn about
other cultures (MEXT, 2017). This was the case despite an overall and consistent low
percentage of Japanese students enrolling in study abroad programs every year—in
2018 and 2019 in Japan, only an average 4.5% of the total 2,500,000 million students
enrolled at the tertiary level studied abroad (JASSO, 2020, 2021). Moreover, although
research has shown that intercultural competence development is more significant in
study abroad programs lasting one year or longer (DeLoach et al., 2019), statistics
by the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO, 2020, 2021) show that only
13% of the total number of students enrolled in study abroad programs in both 2018
and 2019 studied abroad for at least 6 months, suggesting a missed opportunity for
intercultural competence development among most sojourners.
The coronavirus pandemic that assailed the world from early 2020 restricted,
rather severely, student mobility across the globe, forcing higher education institu-
tions worldwide, including in Japan, to consider alternative ways in which to provide
intercultural experiences to their students on domestic campuses. The relationship
between language and culture places foreign language education in a privileged
position to foster interculturally competent graduates on domestic campuses. Yet,
while preparing students for international work environments has been at the core
of Japanese higher education policy for several decades, incorporating intercultural
competence into the EFL curriculum has not, indicating a need to reflect on how this
can be achieved.
Beyond Superficial Cultural Content
Just as the role of foreign language skills in intercultural competence remains under
discussion (Deardorff, 2006), the contribution of specific cultural knowledge to
intercultural learning is also contentious (Kelly, 2020). Even though it is widely
recognized that “language arises from and shapes our experience” (Fantini, 2020,
267), nationalistic trends that encourage monocultural education may effectively
separate the two in Japanese EFL classrooms. What is more, the role of foreign
languages chiefly as the means to economic expansion creates a narrow space for
cultural instruction in classrooms, despite indications that “political and economic
affairs often founder not on a lack of linguistic competence but on a lack of cultural
understanding” (Byram, 2008, 13).
Cultural content included in EFL textbooks, particularly those used at the
secondary level in Japan, often border on superficial and, occasionally even stereo-
typical portrayals of other cultures, with a strong emphasis on the culture of English-
speaking countries in the inner circle. Similarly, anecdotes from EFL faculty at the
higher education level suggest that often intercultural education in EFL classrooms
is geared toward the simplification of cultural paradigms rather than more careful
considerations of complexity. Wilkinson (2020) warns of the dangers of incorpo-
rating brief, superficial aspects of culture, such as traditional cuisine and national
festivals, as an addendum to linguistic competence tasks. She explains that “where
culture is taught, the focus is often on supposedly ‘typical’ representations of the
‘national culture(s)’ with which the language is associated; an approach which creates
and fosters stereotypes and can make learners less rather than more interculturally
competent” (Wilkinson, 2020, 284).
Despite a seemingly narrow approach to intercultural education, EFL classrooms
have the potential to integrate more meaningful and complex discussions about
cultural and intercultural elements regardless of the students’ proficiency level. In
fact, the role of English as the de facto language of international communication posi-
tions English at the centre of the vast amount of information made available both in
print and online. As a result, deep culture information is available in English not only
as regards countries where it is used as the primary language of communication, but
also countries where it is not, opening possibilities in the EFL classroom.
Classroom tasks that guide students beyond surface culture and aim to explore
deep culture may require students to research and critically discuss beliefs, values,
and patterns of thought that guide observable behavior and communication styles.
Students may also be encouraged to discuss both similarities across national borders
and differences within to increase an awareness of themselves and others as cultural
beings. Cultural knowledge acquired through research, discussion, and reflection
may inform and facilitate future intercultural interaction, minimizing conflict in the
workplace as “ineffective communication can result in confusion, frustration, misun-
derstandings, lack of teamwork, conflict, anger, and low morale” (Jackson, 2020,
275–6). Furthermore, tasks that require students to critically research, process, orga-
nize, and present information have the added benefit of helping to cultivate other
skills essential to globally competent human resources, including an understanding
of others’ worldviews and problem-solving skills.
A complementary aspect of intercultural competence that would benefit from
being integrated into EFL classrooms in Japan and beyond is cultural self-awareness,
that is, an individual’s understanding of the impact of cultural forces on one’s
upbringing, rules, biases, and worldview. This may be accomplished through compar-
ative tasks with others not only outside but also within the classroom. Tasks that
require students to reflect on themselves through external lenses have two main
122 A. S. Hofmeyr
advantages: first, they push students’ to see themselves beyond the constructed iden-
tity of Japan as a “monocultural” nation, facilitating the recognition of cultural diver-
sity within national borders; second, they allow students to move beyond cultural
differences to find similarities in values and thought patterns underpinning behavioral
and communicative cultural aspects across borders.
Overall, while integrating snippets of cultural-specific knowledge into EFL class-
rooms as the means to intercultural competence development holds a certain appeal,
especially when there are time and material restrictions, there is great potential in
moving beyond surface culture to address complex cultural values and patterns.
In turn, these might raise cultural self-awareness among not only students but also
faculty, laying a foundation able to inform future interactions with culturally different
others.
The Role of Affective and Behavioral Intercultural

Components
While it is true that English is the de facto language of communication worldwide,

not all intercultural communication occurs in English. In fact, beyond an intimate
political and business relationship with the United States, Japan’s primary economic
and political influences are in Asia, thus requiring future graduates the flexibility
and adaptability to interact appropriately and effectively beyond English-speaking
countries in the inner circle. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that affective
elements, such as curiosity, are at the core of intercultural competence development
(Deardorff, 2006). Similarly, foreign language acquisition, that is, a move beyond
monolingualism, begins with what Fantini (2020) coins incipient bilingualism, or a
willingness to engage and to attempt to communicate with others that do not share a
common tongue, further highlighting the potential of foreign language classrooms.
Hofmeyr’s (2021) analysis of the components of globally competent human
resources identified by the Japanese government and Top Global universities reveals
that affective components such as curiosity, openness, empathy, and tolerance, as
well as behavioral components, such as problem-solving and leadership skills, are
greatly emphasized. The importance placed on affective and behavioral components
by Japanese educational stakeholders opens up a range of educational possibilities
in EFL classrooms. English is no longer bound to culture-specific knowledge, but
rather a door to encounters with a multitude of cultures, perspectives, and takes on
issues of common interest.
Moving away from the grammar translation method and receptive skills, and
introducing more dynamic approaches to EFL education in Japan, such as task-
based learning (TBL) and project-based learning (PBL), has therefore great poten-
tial in terms of the development of both affective and behavioral skills. For instance,
students may be encouraged to confront and/or solve a broad range of situations and
issues through perspectives other than their own, expanding the goals of TBL and PBL
beyond linguistic proficiency to the development of intercultural components such

as curiosity, empathy, and problem-solving skills, among others. Furthermore, as
highlighted by Deardorff and Jones (2012), fostering attitudinal intercultural compo-
nents such as curiosity and openness lead not only to the ability to see from multiple
perspectives, but also to an increased willingness to take risks and to seize oppor-
tunities, both valuable skills for globally competent human resources. Accordingly,
while the traditionally accepted method of integrating intercultural competence into
the classroom might be through culture-specific knowledge, investing in the develop-
ment of attitudes as well as behavioral skills also helps to foster globally competent
human resources.
Global Citizenship Through UNESCO’s SDGs
Throughout history, most national education systems have aimed to generate human
capital, develop a sense of national identity, and promote a sense of social inclusion
(Byram, 2008). It can be argued that in Japan, foreign language education contributes
to the first two goals, both intentionally and unintentionally. More recently, however,
the discourse surrounding internationalization in higher education institutions world-
wide has become increasingly associated with terms analogous to global citizenship.
Objecting that a Western-centric connotation of the term effectively excludes it from
being used in the global South, Jooste and Heleta (2017) rather call for socially
responsible, ethical, and globally competent graduates. This is also an appealing call
for Japan, as it allows for an essentially national workforce to cooperate and contribute
toward the solution of global challenges while retaining its national identity.
Since 2016, Japan has adopted UNESCO’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Devel-
opment Goals (SDGs) as an acceptable form of global citizenship. These 17 goals
and 169 targets allow Japan to contribute academically, economically, and socially
toward global sustainable development, while simultaneously resisting the call for a
multicultural society within Japan’s national borders. In Japanese higher education,
these goals have become increasingly visible in recent years, particularly as univer-
sities aiming to internationalize integrate the SDGs into their academia, research,
and campus life.
Wilkinson (2020, 294) asserts that “intercultural language education becomes
citizenship education when social action is involved; when the intercultural speaker
or mediator becomes politically engaged and active.” With a large volume of infor-
mation and educational materials available in English, SDGs have great potential to
promote intercultural and global competencies in EFL classrooms at Japanese univer-
sities. Moreover, they have the added benefit of allowing for a combined approach
with projects that explore deep culture through TBL and PBL, fostering the cultiva-
tion not only of intercultural knowledge but also of a multitude of intercultural atti-
tudes and skills. While UNESCO’s educational resources for the SDGs are generally
124 A. S. Hofmeyr
targeted to the primary and secondary levels, literature on how to incorporate these
goals at the higher education level in Japan has also begun to emerge (Jodoin 2019;
Muehleisen, 2019) and may be used as a departure point for faculty keen to integrate
these goals into the EFL classroom.
Assessment
The final point that requires consideration regarding the incorporation of intercultural
competence into EFL classrooms is assessment. Despite the link between foreign
language acquisition and intercultural competence development, assessment of the
two remains disconnected—on the one hand, intercultural competence assessment is
largely ignored in EFL classes in Japan in favor of linguistic competence; on the other
hand, intercultural educators and trainers tend to delegate foreign language education
to teachers in the field (Fantini, 2020). In addition, the assessment of foreign language
education outcomes at the institutional level in Japan is often linked to numerical
targets and standardized test scores, excluding an intercultural competence dimension
from consideration.
However, before discussing assessment methods, we should perhaps begin by
asking whether intercultural competence should in fact be assessed as an outcome
of EFL education. In any classroom, assessment must stem from goals set by
the curriculum. Ideally, where both foreign language proficiency and intercultural
competence objectives are set, either by faculty, the institution, or both, then both must
be assessed. Deardorff (2009, 477), explains that “The starting point for assessment
of intercultural competence (…) is not with methods or tools but rather in defining
what it is we are measuring and ensuring that the goals are aligned with overall
mission and purpose of the course, program, or organization.” This stance supports
Byram’s (1997) proposition that the educational, social, and geo-political context
must be taken into consideration in the assessment of intercultural communicative
competence.
Taking course and institutional goals related to foreign language education and
intercultural competence development as a starting point to assessment sheds light on
the aspects to be prioritized and the methods to be used. Introducing an intercultural
competence dimension into EFL courses involves an increase in the time commitment
required of faculty. In order to avoid an exponential increase in the burden related to
additional class preparation, delivery, and assessment, Deardorff (2009) recommends
that measurable objectives related to intercultural competence assessment be limited
and thought of through the acronym SMART: Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented,
Realistic, and Time delineated.
In addition, it is widely agreed that intercultural competence assessment benefits
from relying on a variety of methods beyond self-report and standardized tests,
highlighting the value of using alternative assessment methods, such as portfolios,
reflective journals, and observations, among others (Fantini, 2009). These methods,
which are also broadly used in TBL and PBL approaches, reinforce the idea that
the assessment of these two dimensions does not need to be disconnected, and that
linguistic competence and intercultural competence can be assessed simultaneously.
Overall, intercultural competence development should only be assessed in foreign
language classrooms insofar as it is explicitly incorporated in the classroom and set as
a goal to be achieved either by the faculty, the program, or the institution. Moreover,
the aspects of intercultural competence assessed will depend on the limited number
of affective, cognitive, and behavioral components intentionally addressed by and
through the course. The assessment of intercultural competence as an add-on to
a course focused solely on linguistic competence or a faulty connection between
institutional, program, faculty, and student expectations, on the other hand, has the
potential to significantly hinder, if not entirely prevent, the meaningful and purposeful
assessment of intercultural competence development in EFL classrooms.
Challenges: National Identity, Teacher Training,

and Native-Speakerism
While EFL classrooms show great potential for intercultural competence devel-
opment, there are several interconnected challenges to its implementation in the
Japanese higher education setting.
National Identity
The first, and perhaps greatest challenge is resistance to multiculturalism and multi-
cultural identities in favor of a single, strong national identity. Throughout history,
Japan has been constructed as homogenous despite its diversity, with culturally
different others either being assimilated or becoming invisible in the “homogene-
ity” of Japanese culture (Toyosaki & Eguchi, 2017). Similarly, historical cultural
borrowing from Western nations has been largely regulated and localized by the
government to allow for a continuing sense of “unadulterated” national identity.
The status of English as the de facto language of international business implies
that, while English is essential for Japan to gain access to the global economy, it
also poses a threat to the importance of the national language and, by association, to
the authority of the state (Aspinall 2011). As Fantini (2020, 271) explains, “As one
gains in proficiency, the more likely one will begin to transcend and transform one’s
native system for, as one learns to see things anew, it becomes increasingly difficult
to maintain a monocular vision of the world.” Becoming proficient in English is
thus perceived as leading to a loss of authenticity of Japanese identity in favor of
“otherness.” In reality, this association between foreign language proficiency and
“otherness” expands to domestic settings beyond EFL education, with returnees and
second and third-generation immigrants often feeling that their multiple identities
126 A. S. Hofmeyr
are unrecognized and that they are excluded from the national discourse surrounding
Japanese national identity (Toyosaki & Eguchi, 2017).
In fact, while it is true that MEXT actively encourages the cultivation of a global
workforce through EFL education at the higher education level, it is also true that it
emphasizes the role of educational institutions in establishing and reinforcing a sense
of Japanese national identity. Studies conducted by Inuzuka (2017) and Hofmeyr
(2021) revealed that the “Japaneseness” rhetoric promoted by the government in
their internationalization policies is mirrored by universities aiming to internation-
alize through government funding. These universities generally commit not only to
fostering a positive national identity among Japanese students but also to promoting
Japanese culture overseas. Inuzuka (2017, 216) reflects on the rationale beyond this
dichotomy in governmental and institutional policy:
Presumably, students who are well-grounded in their own culture are less likely to be influ-
enced by foreign cultures. Instilling a positive Japanese identity in addition to teaching
students communicative English and sending them overseas might be perceived as a
protective measure by the education ministry.
As a result of policies stressing the importance of a strong national identity,

EFL education in Japan is often deprived of intercultural content beyond superficial
depictions of culturally different others. These help to create a “homogeneous” imag-
ined national identity by focusing on differences without necessarily addressing the
complexity of cultural paradigms. In turn, among students this contrast reinforces
the conceptualization of Japanese culture as unique and inherently different from
other cultures, ultimately hindering intercultural competence development in EFL
classrooms.
Teacher Training
A second major challenge to the integration of intercultural competence skills in

foreign language classrooms in Japan is a deficiency of intercultural training and
intercultural self-awareness among EFL teachers. The growing demand for inter-
cultural skills valuable in global business interactions implies a need for educators
capable of consciously integrating such skills into the curriculum. Yet, EFL teachers
are often unprepared to undertake such tasks.
A study by Igawa (2014) put forward that while pre- and in-service Japanese
teachers of English with experience abroad reported development in both foreign
language proficiency and cross-cultural understanding, most EFL teachers are
unlikely to have traveled abroad. As a result, most Japanese teachers of English are
likely to have graduated from national institutions, where the system that compart-
mentalizes foreign language and culture is maintained in efforts to preserve an
“homogeneous” national identity. At the elementary and secondary levels, Japan has
also invested heavily on attracting English Language Teachers (ELTs) from English-
speaking countries through the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program in
order to provide students with intercultural experiences. Yet, these teachers are often
perceived as guests and/or celebrities in the community, undermining their position,
role, and responsibilities as language teachers (Simmons & Chen, 2017).
Internationalization policy documents published by MEXT have highlighted the
need to increase numbers of native English-speaking teachers to teach EFL classes
(Whitsed & Volet, 2011) as well as of Japanese teachers with experience abroad
(MEXT, 2017) at the tertiary level. However, the difficulty in obtaining tenured
status for most non-Japanese EFL teachers in Japan, along with the little relevance
of Western degrees for upward mobility in higher education (Ishikawa, 2011), have
obstructed this goal.
Williams (2001, 111) raises awareness to the necessity of intercultural training
among educators, by stating that “teachers who will introduce their students to new
cultural values and beliefs as part of the development of intercultural competence
themselves need to experience and reflect on what this means in practice.” Discus-
sions on how to develop intercultural competence among educators have highlighted
the value of intercultural training not only to help EFL educators to consider ways
in which to incorporate intercultural competence beyond surface culture (Hajiso-
teriou & Angelides, 2016; Lazarević, 2017), but also to the overall improvement
of classroom dynamics. Studies show that intercultural training has the potential to
increase teachers’ awareness of their own values and beliefs about diversity (Hajiso-
teriou & Angelides, 2016), to improve both teacher-student and student–student
interactions (Williams, 2001), and to inform educational approaches in linguistically
and culturally diverse classrooms (Hajisoteriou & Angelides, 2016; Jackson, 2020).
For EFL faculty to be able to support students in their quest to become intercul-
turally competent human resources, they must themselves be offered opportunities
to experience intercultural environments and receive intercultural training. Further
benefits will emerge if exposure to other cultures, directly or indirectly, is comple-
mented by reflexive practices as well as practical considerations on how to incorporate
intercultural awareness and skills into the EFL classroom.
Native-Speakerism and Student Confidence
A final major challenge to the integration of intercultural competence skills in EFL

classrooms in Japan is the unachievable goal of “native speaker” fluency. Wilkinson
(2020) contrasts the goals of native speaker and intercultural speaker in foreign
language education, defending that a focus on lexical and grammatical accuracy, i.e.,
linguistic competence, may effectively hinder the openness needed to communicate
without fear of making mistakes. This argument is supported by Byram (2008, 205),
who defends that “because it is extremely difficult, though not impossible, to achieve
this [native speaker] goal, learners have a constant sense of failure.”
English language education policy in Japan increasingly encourages a commu-
nicative approach over the traditional grammar translation approach, suggesting a
growing economic need for communication with culturally different others both
128 A. S. Hofmeyr
within and beyond national borders. Yet, the pressure of native-speakerism as an

“attainable” goal not only for students but also for teachers perpetuates an approach
to English language education that focuses primarily on vocabulary and grammar
(Fantini, 2020), further excluding intercultural competence from the EFL curriculum.
Moving forward, a change in paradigm requires an understanding that while an inter-
cultural speaker is expected to have some linguistic competence, the emphasis should
rather be on the ability to understand and mediate cultural contexts while remaining
aware of one’s own cultural positioning.
Conclusions
An integrated approach to foreign language education and intercultural competence

development has the potential to facilitate relationships with people from other
cultures while simultaneously shattering stereotypical, monocultural worldviews.
Connecting these two elements, however, requires a drastic change to the current
EFL curriculum at Japanese universities that must originate in a realization that inter-
cultural competence is essential to globally competent human resources capable of
working appropriately and effectively across borders. Teaching approaches that aim
to explore deep culture, to intentionally cultivate attitudinal and behavioral compo-
nents of intercultural competence, and to consider global issues beyond national
borders hold great potential.
Still, challenges related to perceived threats to national identity and the national
language, a deficiency in teacher intercultural training, and the pressure of native-
speakerism hinder the implementation of intercultural competence goals in EFL
classrooms at Japanese universities. Nevertheless, if Japan is to continue to aim
for increased economic expansion and improved political ties, it must accept that
intercultural competence is a key complement of linguistic competence and, as such,
it must be intentionally integrated into the EFL curriculum.
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Chapter 9
Creative Cultural History as a Medium
for Social and Emotional Learning:
Teaching Students to Present the Stories
of Their Community Across Cultural
Boundaries
Christa Knellwolf King
Abstract This essay introduces an interdisciplinary humanities course, titled

Creative Cultural History, that teaches social and emotional learning (SEL) as a basis
for equipping students with essential transferable skills enabling them to contribute
to the creation of a more inclusive society. Providing an overview of neuroscien-
tific studies of emotion, reading, and comprehension, the essay explains how and
why stories and storytelling can engender openness toward cultural difference. To
illustrate how storytelling can bridge cultural boundaries, the essay describes an inter-
disciplinary course that was developed and first taught by the author in the Depart-
ment of English and Translation at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. This course
required its participants to collect cultural memories, folk- and fairytales from older
members of their community, and then to retell them to audiences unfamiliar with
the cultural backgrounds of their communities. As a preparation for this task, the
students were introduced to the basics of social and emotional learning, particularly
“double listening,” a technique that necessitates listening to the content of a story
as well as listening to the non-verbal messages contained within the language used
by the interlocutors. Discussing practical examples from student work, the essay
demonstrates that the course expanded the emotional awareness of its participants
while also making them more accepting of cultural differences. The results gathered
from the initiative suggest that teaching social and emotional skills equips students
with important interpersonal and communication skills. This enhances their ability
to tell stories and increases their awareness of the needs of interlocutors, which in
turn helps them to engender openness for cultural difference.
Keywords Creative cultural history · Social and emotional intelligence · Cultural

boundaries · Interpersonal skills · Communication skills
C. Knellwolf King (B)

University of York, York, United Kingdom
e-mail: knellwolf.christa@gmail.com; Christa.Knellwolf@york.ac.uk
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_9
132 C. Knellwolf King
Introduction
One of the challenges of a healthy globalized society is to ensure that misunder-

standings and tensions between members of different cultural communities do not
escalate. To this end, most universities worldwide have realized that they have to
prepare graduates who can communicate effectively across personal and cultural
boundaries. There is a clearly recognized need for courses and educational programs
that engender openness to cultural difference. But it is less clear how such a goal can
be achieved.
A number of initiatives have been in existence for many years. Institutions like
the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies at the Australian National University seek to
engender a welcoming disposition toward cultural difference by studying the ethno-
graphic, sociological and psychological principles that hold cultural communities
together. Such activities make important contributions toward overcoming hostile
preconceptions and stereotypes. However, there is an urgent need for more practically
oriented approaches to bridging the barriers between individuals and communities.
This is particularly important at a time when there is no telling how social distancing, a
preventive measure against the spread of COVID-19, has affected prevailing attitudes
toward cultural difference. Already, at the time of writing, misguided individuals
who are looking for a scapegoat for the pandemic have instigated hostilities against
Chinese people. Considered in a different light, the pandemic has also revealed that
it takes very little for human beings from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds to
feel vulnerable and frightened about their own and their families’ well-being. The
experience of the lockdown has highlighted that there is a critical need for practical
strategies that help us master the worries and anxieties caused by a situation that has
restricted immediate social encounters to those who share our homes.
This essay introduces some of the many fascinating opportunities afforded by
recent neuroscientific research on emotions and suggests academic courses that can
be used as vehicles for mastering the emotions at the heart of all thought processes
and decision-making. It introduces the empirically warranted constructionist theory
of emotion, which was developed by the distinguished neuroscientist Barrett (2017).
It also introduces pedagogical methods and their practical application, which are
informed by emotional intelligence, a field of inquiry with the potential to revolu-
tionize the methods and educational standards of all levels of education. The essay
engages with practical tools that were popularized by Goleman (1996) and devel-
oped more recently by the RULER (2020) initiative by the Yale Center for Emotional
Intelligence. Most importantly, it describes practical applications of the recognition
that emotions are important tools of social interaction and communication (Barrett,
2017).
This essay discusses ways in which the individual skills that constitute emotional
intelligence can be taught through innovative academic courses in the fields of cross-
cultural studies and intercultural communication. Such initiatives in the design of
new courses fit well into Departments of English that are responding to the rapidly
changing needs of graduates who want to succeed in an increasingly multicultural
9 Creative Cultural History as a Medium for Social and Emotional Learning … 133
workforce. The essay takes advantage of the fact that emotional skills are closely
linked to the ways in which people communicate with each other: how we use
language to encapsulate affective experience in concepts (Barrett, 2017), and how
we embed the affective resonances of individual concepts in a narrative, anecdote or
story, however, short it may be.
A premise of this essay is that stories, whose analysis is the main task of liter-
ature courses, are an important vehicle for exploring the conditions under which
imaginary and historically real characters have emotional experience because they
describe the causes and the consequences of particular instances of emotion. Fictional
stories play an important role in the culture industry of societies and are studied in
programs devoted to the study of literature and culture. However, they are also a
crucial component of everyday experiences since stories are a conduit for acquiring,
refining, and exchanging social and emotional experiences. Most importantly, stories
play an essential role in our daily interactions with family, friends, colleagues, and
strangers because they can connect people across cultural and personal boundaries
(Oatley, 2011, Knellwolf King 2019a).
Even when we have a chat with a friend, we are swapping miniature stories, or
anecdotes, which recount the small adventures of daily life. We do so because “sto-
ries” (a term that includes anecdotes, gossip, oral memories, literary stories, docu-
mentaries, as well as folk- and fairy tales) can forge connections between readers,
writers and the communities represented in their texts. The essay argues that stories
are important tools for bridging cultural divides precisely because they can convey
the message that there are more similarities than differences between people from
very different cultural backgrounds.
Cultural translation features prominently in this essay since the process of telling
stories across cultural boundaries necessarily involves translation. Emotions play a
prominent role in translation because a successful translation is to a large extent
the result of the ability to convey information about how particular communities
feel about their standards and values. As discussed in the context of this essay,
cultural translation is grounded in the idea that translators can successfully convey
culturally specific information, if they make sure that the target audience can grasp
how particular members of the original community felt about the issues described.
The essay then moves from the theoretical to the practical principles of using
techniques of telling and analyzing stories in one particular course, which I developed
at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman, titled Creative Cultural History. A major aim
of this course is to teach students to acquire social and emotional skills as a basis
for recognizing that people who belong to different cultural backgrounds can have
almost identical emotional experiences. It is important to be aware that the reasons
that cause an experience of, say, sadness, are culturally specific (Barrett, 2017), but
it is nevertheless possible to empathize across cultural boundaries with the negative
experience of loss and disappointment that are expressed by a particular human being.
The presentation of the practical results of the interdisciplinary course empha-
sizes that the course goal of teaching social and emotional skills is a crucial step-
ping stone toward developing intercultural competencies. Teaching this course over
several years has provided ample evidence that it strengthens students’ abilities to talk
confidently, in written and spoken format, about their own cultural background and
identity. Moreover, by developing social and emotional skills, it prepares graduates
who can communicate effectively with people from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Having acquired the basic skillset of emotional intelligence, they can become the
ambassadors of a constructive approach to relating to themselves and to other people,
and by so doing, contribute to building an inclusive multicultural environment that
makes all members feel respected and valued.
The Theoretical Framework: Emotions in Reading

and Storytelling
The theoretical part of this essay engages with the challenge of applying recent results
in the neurosciences to the task of teaching emotional skills. It uses the observation
that stories elicit emotional experiences as a point of departure for explaining how
and why stories are an important conduit for habituating us to one or more commu-
nities’ ways of seeing, and making sense of the world. It also provides the basis for
understanding the educational value of stories.
Stories elicit emotions. This is not simply an enjoyable side effect of reading,
but it also serves an important purpose, since it enables readers to catch a glimpse
of the state of mind of others (Zunshine, 2006). Stories provide unique access to
the mind and the inner world of other people, which we do not have in ordinary
life. The privileged access to the mental processes of the characters described in a
story teaches us to make informed guesses about their intentions and emotions. The
neuroscientist Matthew D. Lieberman states that “mindreading is so basic to who we
are that we rarely notice it” (2015, 108). However, we are not born with the ability
to attribute a state of mind to others. We acquire and develop the skill in the course
of exchanging stories and anecdotes that include speculative interpretations of how
other people think and feel (Oatley, 1999, 2006).
When stories describe how characters felt about a particular moment in their lives,
they familiarize us with the idea that all humans have emotions, and that although
emotional experience is deeply personal, it is possible to gain a good sense of how
another person feels. Patrick Colm Hogan, a pioneer in the cognitive humanities,
has for many years applied the results from the neurosciences to the interpretation
of literary representations of emotion. He argues that stories teach their readers or
listeners how to use emotions according to culturally defined rules (Hogan, 2011).
The empirical studies conducted by Barrett (2017) corroborate Hogan’s views. She
concludes: “Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver
of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input
and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action” (Barrett,
2017, 31). Our emotions enable us to register and make sense of the world, because
“[e]motions are meaning,” (Barrett, 2017, 126), an argument that had previously
been proposed by the philosopher Keith Opdahl (2002).
Barrett asserts that we are not born with an innate capacity to attribute meaning
to sensory experience but have to learn how to interpret the significance of the infor-
mation that has been collected by our senses. She notes that “concepts like ‘Anger’
and ‘Disgust’ are not genetically predetermined. Your familiar emotion concepts are
built-in only because you grew up in a particular social context where those emotion
concepts are meaningful and useful, and your brain applies them outside your aware-
ness to construct your experiences” (Barrett, 2017, 33). Meaning is no objectively
given entity, but it is created by emotions for the purpose of alerting us to the signifi-
cance of a particular aspect of the world we live in. Our emotions evaluate what this
aspect means for us. If we are in a room in which the temperature is pleasant, we
are inclined to relax, and if it is unpleasantly cold, our emotions encourage us to act,
for example by turning the heating up. Barrett developed what she calls a “theory
of constructed emotions” in order to explain that “Emotions are not reactions to the
world; they are your construction of the world” (Barrett, 2017, 104).
Barrett’s argument has profound implications, which go far beyond the scope of
this essay. I will only be able to engage with some implications which are particularly
relevant to the pedagogical practice of academics in literary and cultural studies.
Barrett’s conclusions can be used to explain what we mean by an effectively written
text: that it is a text that enables readers to have complex emotional experiences. On
the stylistic level, such texts use narrative techniques, such as “showing” in order
to enable their readers to have powerful and yet subtle experiences of emotion, in
addition to “telling” them that a character felt sad or angry or afraid (cf. Klauk &
Köppe, 2014).
Readers respond particularly well to stories that make them care for another
human being (Lieberman, 2015). The psychiatrist and literary critic Robert Coles
in fact argues that stories develop our ability to care for each other. He asserts that
reading (or listening to) stories develops our ethical imagination, concluding that
literature is an essential part of human existence because the mental work required to
make sense of stories enables us to understand how we can lead a “life that connects
to others, one that makes moral sense” (Coles, 1989, 139).
Readers are likely to reach out to characters, and the cultural community to which
they belong, if a story engages their emotions. The most important aspect of a story,
regardless of whether it is a written portrait, a novel, a biography, a feature film, or
any other type of narrative, is that it deals with people. If a particular story is written
or translated for an anonymous international audience, it introduces its readers to
characters who may come from a cultural background that is deeply unfamiliar and
hence may feel very strange to the majority of readers.
Oatley describes the experience of reading as a “meeting of identification,” which
is “a species of empathy, in which we do not merely sympathize with a person,
we become that person. But again, there is a contrast with ordinary life, in which
we remain steadfastly ourselves, while the person we meet, and with whom we
empathize, remains himself or herself” (Oatley, 1999, 446). Reader identification
gets stronger, if characters are well developed, this means, if readers can empathically
experience their state of mind (Zaki & Ochsner, 2016). Conversely, if a text offers
detailed descriptions of the emotions and the state of mind of its characters, it enables
its readers to share their emotions, and by doing so, feel connected to them. This aspect
of the reading experience is particularly important when literary works bridge the
cultural backgrounds of readers and writers. It shows that texts can enable readers to
feel connected with imaginary characters, which in turn engenders a more accepting
attitude to the communities that are referred to by imaginary characters.
For writers, or translators, of stories that traverse cultural boundaries, this means
that they have to help readers to recognize that the stories are imbued with culturally
specific meanings and emotions, while they are also sharing deeply human charac-
teristics (Baker, 2009). Even though it is important to be aware that the reasons why a
character may feel sad or anxious is idiosyncratic, it is nevertheless possible to form
emotional attachments. If readers are enabled to share the emotions of the characters
of stories, they are less likely to form judgemental views, or to impose their own
standards on a foreign culture.
As Gillespie puts it, stories develop the imaginative capacities as well as the
empathic skills of their readers (Gillespie, 1994). Stories that describe the inner
experience of fictional and historically real characters can reduce the gulf between
people because they shed light on the state of mind of another human being. By so
doing, they affirm the shared humanity of readers and imaginary characters (Oatley,
2006). Stories clearly also develop the imagination. Our imagination, however, is
closely linked to our emotions. When we say that a story enables us to imagine a
different world, this means that it allows us to grasp what it might feel like to live in
a different place at a different time: for example, in eighteenth-century Russia, or in
a world in which people can only communicate via electronic means (Gerrig, 1993,
2004).
Teaching Social and Emotional Skills
The next section of this essay describes ways by which the results from the neuro-
sciences can be applied in the academic classroom. Important practical work has
already been conducted by the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence. They have
identified five separate emotional skills which they unite in the acronym RULER:
recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions (Brackett
et al. 2011, RULER, 2020). A recognition that has profound ramifications for the
development of academic syllabi is that ALL components of RULER play a part in
ALL academic tasks. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the academic achieve-
ments of students improve, if they participate in activities that develop their mastery
of emotions (Hoffmann et al., 2020), and, in particular, emotion concepts (Barrett,
2017).
The five emotional skills embraced by RULER can be developed in a myriad of
different ways. They can be strengthened particularly well by courses that are devoted
to storytelling and/or the analysis of texts, and open up a whole new dimension
for departments of English that recognize that they must respond to the changing
needs of society. Here is a brief overview of how the five skills can be incorporated
into an innovative course. “Recognizing emotions” can well be practiced in the

context of learning to listen to the emotions that envelop the content of spoken
and written messages. Students develop the ability “to understand the reasons that
trigger particular emotional responses,” if a task requires them to describe the state
of mind of interlocutors or imaginary characters. The ability to understand emotions,
which provides the basis for the ability to describe them, is also closely linked to
the next skill. This means, students learn to “label emotions” when they have to find
appropriate emotion concepts to describe the state of mind of the characters of a
story. The task of writing about the emotions experienced by fictional characters or
interlocutors positively impacts the students’ ability to express emotions themselves.
Finally, “regulating emotions” describes the capacity to manage or regulate emotions,
which means to remain confident under pressure, and to exert a calming influence
in situations of conflict.
The skill of regulating emotions deserves special attention, since the ability to stay
calm in moments of stress and conflict is a highly valued attribute of every employee
(Lieberman, 2015). Self-help and professional development guides have for many
years suggested a whole range of tricks that should, for example, help to reduce the
fear of giving a public presentation: they recommend breathing in deeply, thinking
of a loved person, actively remembering previous successes, and much more. Prac-
tical experiments by Barrett have demonstrated that the most effective step toward
emotional mastery is to expand our vocabulary of emotion words. Empirical research
of what she describes as emotional granularity has enabled her to demonstrate: “Stu-
dents with a richer emotion vocabulary do better in school” (Barrett, 2017, 175;
Tugade, Fredrickson & Barrett, 2004). The ability to label the emotions of another
person can not only calm down escalated individuals (Lieberman 2007; Torre &
Lieberman, 2018; Noll, 2017) but also improves the ability to forge social relations
and to connect with people from different cultural contexts (Knellwolf King, 2019b).
A fascinating observation is that developing emotional skills requires neither
expensive infrastructure nor long years of training. What is required is that univer-
sities and policymakers recognize the profound changes that can be achieved with
quite simple tools. Once a commitment to a new way of dealing with emotions has
been made, a great deal of progress can be achieved if students are regularly given
assignments that require them to identify, label, discuss, or talk about the emotions
that are used to convey the complexity of individual texts.
Teaching Emotional Intelligence: The Course in Creative

Cultural History
Since it incorporates the development of social and emotional competencies into its
syllabus, my course in Creative Cultural History, offered each semester between 2018
and 2021 in the Department of English and Translation at Sultan Qaboos University,
Oman, will now be described in some detail. This interdisciplinary course concen-
trates on developing the skills that are involved in reading and storytelling. The
course begins by practicing interpersonal and listening skills, since it requires the
course participants to conduct interviews with members of their family and commu-
nity, as a means of collecting stories and memories. In order to prepare them for
this task, students are introduced to the theoretical principles expounded by Pierre
Bourdieu (1996), and they are familiarized with the principles of interviewing which
are employed by practitioners of oral history (Thompson, 2000).
Bourdieu’s work on the interviewing process challenges traditional theories of
sociological methods when he rejects established beliefs according to which inter-
viewers must aim to be uninvolved observers. He instead argues that interviewers
should cultivate what he calls a sociological “feel” or “eye” that “enables one to
perceive and monitor on the spot, as the interview is actually being carried out, the
effects of the social structures within which it is taking place” (Bourdieu, 1996, 18).
He explains that the relationship between interviewers and informants should be built
on “a relationship of active and methodical listening,” grounded in thorough knowl-
edge of the socio-cultural conditions that shape a particular informant’s experience,
which then renders them capable of reconciling “total attention to the person ques-
tioned […] with methodical construction, founded on the knowledge of objective
conditions common to an entire social category” (Bourdieu, 1996, 19).
Bourdieu postulates a commitment to seeing informants and their memories
embedded in the context of their social background and class. However, he also
suggests that the human dimension of an interview can challenge barriers of race,
class, and gender. To this end, he proposes that there should be a sense of affinity,
or empathy, which means that the interviewing process should be “accompanied by
an attentiveness to others and an openness toward them rarely met with in everyday
life” (Bourdieu, 1996, 23). His discussion of the conditions and effects of an inter-
view appear in a section that uses the sub-heading “a spiritual exercise” to describe
a well-conducted and insightful interview:
Thus, at the risk of shocking both the rigorous methodologist and the inspired hermeneutical
scholar, I would willingly say that the interview can be considered a sort of spiritual exercise,
aiming to obtain, through forgetfulness of self , a true transformation of the view we take of
others in the ordinary circumstances of life.
The welcoming disposition, which leads one to share the problem of the respondent, the
capacity to take her and understand her just as she is, in her distinctive necessity, is a sort of
intellectual love. (Bourdieu, 1996, 24)
The unconditional attention to the other person requires that the interviewer must
concentrate on the content as well as on “the voice […], the intonation, the rhythm
(each interview has its own tempo which is not that of reading), the language of
gesture, the gesticulations and all the body posture, etc.” (Bourdieu, 1996, 31).
Bourdieu’s use of the term “intellectual love” indicates that he understands an
interview as a unique encounter between human beings. It creates a space of safety
that allows informants to reveal who they really are. Indeed, it is a special type
of encounter that requires great attentiveness to the human complexity of another
person. Such an intense level of attentiveness transcends the process of acquiring

knowledge about another human being, and by doing so engenders attachment and
connectedness.
Bourdieu’s emphasis on the non-verbal aspects of communication serves as a
backdrop to the practical dimension of the interviewing process, which is summa-
rized, for example, in Thompson’s (2000) introduction to the practical side of
collecting oral history. So as to enable students to recognize the messages that are
conveyed by the non-verbal components of communication, they are introduced to
“double listening,” a skillset that was coined by Robert Bolton (1979), one of the
pioneers in the field of conflict studies.
There are at least two levels to any simple anecdote we tell each other: we express
the content (this means, we mention “what happened”), and we include cues that show
how we “feel about” what happened. The emotions that outline our attitude toward the
semantic content of a particular message are absorbed on a largely unconscious level.
Unfortunately, most people have gone through an educational system that privileges
content over form, which means that they lack awareness of the non-verbal dimension
of communication. This explains why we have to learn to pay attention to the formal
modalities in which content is expressed. It is only then that we can grasp the full
meaning of a particular act of communication.
Double listening complements the associated ability to understand that people
who revisit old memories tend to go through intense emotional experiences. This
means that students have to prepare themselves carefully so that they can respond
sensitively to their informants (Baker, 2009; Thompson, 2000). When students are
prepared well for conducting an interview, they have to be taught how to respond
non-judgementally to the anger, resentment, frustration, sadness, and other emotions,
which might accompany the narrative of their informant. An important detail learnt
from studies in the psychological neurosciences is to refrain from trying to soothe
informants with well-intentioned but in fact hurtful comments like “don’t be sad,” or
“don’t worry.” Since such formulations invalidate the emotions of another person,
they make an interlocutor feel disrespected. In the words of the acclaimed initiator
of peace-making initiatives in high-security prisons Douglas E. Noll, “Emotional
invalidation is one of the most lethal forms of childhood emotional abuse. It kills
confidence, creativity, and individuality” (Noll, 2017, 37). Because emotional inval-
idation is so dominant in our society, it is fundamentally important to emphasize that
emotional invalidation destroys the relationship of trust that takes so much time to
build.
The first and foremost task of the interviewer is to listen and to refrain from
judging the informant. This means that interviewers must refrain from any attempt
to influence informants’ emotions about what they are saying. Skilful interviewers
can accept that another person may be angry, while realizing that there is no need
to agree with their reasons for feeling this way. By refraining from judgemental
responses, we show our interlocutors that we are unconditionally accepting them as
human beings.
In practical terms, the students are taught to pay attention to the different
dimensions of an informant’s story, which means they are taught:
(1) To listen to WHAT their informants are saying (content) and

(2) To listen to HOW informants are expressing themselves.
Of course, only the second skill is new. It necessitates paying attention to the
emotions that are demonstrated via non-verbal cues (tone of voice, facial expressions,
gestures, body posture) in order to get a sense of how interlocutors feel about their
memories.
The following exercise was developed as a means of enabling students to recognize
the emotions that are expressed in a concrete utterance. It consists of placing a teddy
bear on a chair at the front of the class. Then the instructor raises her voice to
shouting pitch and says in the most aggressive tone she can master: “Teddy, you are
too shy! You have to stop being shy! I want you to be confident and assertive!” When
students are asked to concentrate on the literal meaning of the words, they describe
a well-intentioned concern for the well-being of another person. However, when
students are asked to name the emotions they heard in the voice of the instructor,
they identify anger, frustration, disappointment, contempt, disrespect, as well as
dispositions like impatience and dislike. Most students experience this exercise as an
unsettling revelation that there can be a major contradiction between the seemingly
supportive words of an utterance and its oral delivery. This particular example shows
that the words used are sometimes almost irrelevant by comparison with the non-
verbal messages of an utterance.
After the experiment with Teddy has shown that there can be a stark contrast
between the literal meaning of the words used and the implied meaning of an utter-
ance, the students embark on further exercises that are designed to help them develop
an ear for more subtle differences. Recognizing the importance of the tone of voice
to the full meaning of an utterance, students analyze less obvious examples. For
example, they learn that a grandmother’s way of expressing herself can make an
important difference to what she means when she says, “you young people no longer
care for traditional skills.” If she says so with a twinkle in her eye, she may be teasing
her grandchildren and may try to elicit their protest, whereas another grandmother
who expresses the same sentence in a sad and flat voice may have given up every
attempt to make her grandchildren respect her for her traditional skills. The ability to
pay attention to the emotional nuances of other people’s mode of expressing them-
selves enables an unprecedented and extremely positive recognition that they are
human beings with their own individual ways of experiencing and making sense of
the world (Lieberman, 2015).
The Role of Emotions in Cultural Translation
Translation plays a prominent role in cross-cultural endeavors. The course in Creative

Cultural History in fact practices different types of translation. The students at Sultan
Qaboos University collect stories in their native language, which is Omani Arabic for
most of them, and they translate them into English. Additional types of translation are
included in the Creative Cultural History Course too. Orally communicated stories
have to be transformed into a written text, and, most importantly, culturally specific
information has to be transformed and translated in a manner that the stories about a
local community become accessible and meaningful to an anonymous international
audience.
The task of translating culturally specific material is fraught with difficulties. It
is a subjective task to identify the discourses, or the elements of a message, that
express what it means to belong to a particular cultural community. Of course,
there are a myriad ways of transferring them across boundaries of language and
culture (Baker, 2011). Cultural translation necessarily is a balancing act, since it
means to clarify the values and meanings of the community that gave rise to the text
for an audience that may not share them. As Martin explains: “Values are abstract
concepts” (Martin, 2016, 1709). They pertain “to desirable end states or modes of
conduct, that transcend specific situations, [and] guide the selection or evaluation of
behavior, people, and events” (Schwarz 1990, 20). Values are abstractions, but they
become more tangible when we remember that they are expressed in the emotions that
accompany the narration of a story. This means, we can gain a better understanding of
how a particular community feels, for example, about punctuality, when we observe
the non-verbal messages that accompany an anecdote told by one of its members
about being late.
The ability to retell the stories of local communities for international audiences
requires students to imagine that they are in the shoes of their informant, which means
they are encouraged to understand, if not share, the emotions that are associated with
their life story. I want to illustrate this with an example taken from a student exercise
that was submitted in Fall 2019. In the first draft of the story, one female student
wrote about her grandmother’s early years of being married. The student simply
mentioned her grandmother’s comment that the second wife of her husband never
had to fetch water, nor did she have to join in the task of gathering wood. In my
feedback, I advised this student to flesh out the significance of these comments. In
order to do so, she had to conduct some historical research and went back to her
grandmother and asked for more detailed information about the nature of the work
she had to do as a young woman. She was told to pay careful attention to how her
grandmother expressed her feelings about the topic. Once the student was aware of
the extreme physical hardship involved in a seemingly simple task, her writing gained
more depth. She now grasped what it meant to collect wood and fetch water in the
old days. This enabled her to talk eloquently about the women of the village sharing
the physically hard and time-consuming task of fetching water. She could explain
that fetching water meant to carry heavy jugs to the falaj, the typically Omani system
of channeling water, in order to fill them and bring them back. By developing her
emotional awareness, the student also gained a better understanding of how deeply
hurt her grandmother had felt, when her husband burdened her with all the hard work
while he allowed his second wife to spend her time gossiping with her friends.
When students have to translate their stories across cultural boundaries, they
have to think about potential gaps in the knowledge of their target audience. If
they are addressing an international audience, which knows hardly anything about a
country like Oman, they have to provide additional information in which they explain
culturally specific traditions and conventions. This might mean that they have to
explain the gendering of tasks that were customary in the old days. As regards the
example I mentioned above, students might explain that fetching wood used to be
women’s work, but they can also convey a sense of what it felt like to perform these
tasks. They can describe concrete moments when a group of women set out to gather
wood, and they can describe how women used to meet in the early hours, equipped
with a few dates, a small amount of water, and ropes to tie the branches they found
into bundles. They can elaborate that gathering wood frequently required walking
for two or three hours, until the women found some dry branches, and that it was
very exhausting work to carry the unwieldy burden all the way back. In addition,
they also gain a better sense of the solidarity and the strong social bond between the
women who regularly worked together. The task of becoming aware of such details
helps members of the young generation, whose experiences diverge strongly from
that of their grandparents, to understand the deep sense of injustice and jealousy that
might be triggered if the tasks were not shared equally and fairly.
There is a lot of demand for the stories of local communities, such as those of
the Omani people. In order to satisfy an international audience’s desire for authentic
information, presenters of cultural history have to realize that their audiences want to
read or watch engagingly told narratives. They have to find creative ways of talking
about their community and the traditions which are handed down from generation
to generation. Students also have to learn to talk about the values that are embedded
in individual stories. When they have to explain how members of their community
feel about customs and conventions, they develop emotional skills without being
aware of doing so. An important caveat has to be added here: emotion concepts
are not universal (Barrett, 2017, 42–55). When students are taught to describe the
personality, the non-verbal habits and the emotions of their interlocutor, they have
to be sensitized to the fact that there are culturally specific terms for the description
of emotions that are very difficult to translate (De Leersnyder, 2017). This means
students are taught to listen for emotion concepts that are unique to the language
of their informants, such as which, according to the information of Hajer Al
Musalhi, transliterates as “mustathqila” and translates as “you feel reluctant to do a
task because you are in a very bad mood.”
One result of their increased emotional awareness is that students can add depth
to the personality of particular characters, and they can create a sense of atmosphere
for the description of particular historical moments and locations. They also learn
what they have to do in order to draw anonymous readers, listeners, and interlocutors
into their descriptions, which equips them with a solid understanding of how they
can help their audiences to connect to the people and communities described by their
stories.
Skills Developed and Applied by the Course in Creative

Cultural History
In this section, I want to discuss some representative student work to explain how
the course in Creative Cultural History applied theoretical principles and developed
the students’ abilities to express themselves confidently when communicating across
personal and cultural boundaries.
A first milestone is reached, when students learn to work with the distinction
between “showing” and “telling” (Klauk & Köppe, 2014), and in particular, are able
to use the technique of “showing” as a means of conveying what is so special about
a much-loved member of the family. In concrete terms, my students realized that a
text that simply mentions that “my grandmother is a kind person” is shallow, which
means that it is unlikely to attract the interest of a reader or listener. Conversely,
a vivid description of a loveable character appeals to readers because it creates
emotional bonds between readers, narrators (or storytellers), and the community
members described. To illustrate this, I want to comment on the loving portrait of
Um Rashid, written by Malak Al Mamari, a female student who took the course in
Spring 2019. The title of her portrait “Um Rashid” literally means “the mother of
Rashid,” which reflects the Arab habit of referring to a woman who has had children
as the mother of her eldest son.
Malak’s portrait of Um Rashid describes the personality and habits of an elderly
member of her family. The description of the endearing characteristics of this lady
conveys her uniqueness, and it provides a space for the account of the great pain she
suffered when she was only 9 years old, when her father refused to let her see her
mother after the parents got divorced. One detail that makes Um Rashid special is
that she is shown to devote a lot of energy to making the guest who has come to
interview her feel honored. In spite of the many aches that are racking her body, she
prepares and slices fruit and makes kahwa, the typically Omani coffee. Even audience
members who come from a very different cultural background can easily sense the
old lady’s loving attention to her young visitor. Malak concludes her portrait:
When it was time to leave, I told her that I was enchanted by the lovely henna pattern on her
hands and the beauty of her floral dress. She responded with her bright laughter which was
the laughter of a lady who has deep knowledge about the ways of the world. I was waiting for
her special way of saying goodbye. When Um Rashid says goodbye, she sprinkles rosewater
on my hair, and while wafting the smoke of the incense burner towards me, she ever so gently
whispers “take care”.
This passage in Malak’s description outlines the loving relationship between

herself and an elderly member of her community. By using the technique of showing,
she triggers her readers’ empathic response, and by so doing, makes it possible for
them to participate in the bonding experience between the elderly lady and her young
visitor. The technique of “showing” is a core element of class discussions that are
devoted to improving writing skills. Furthermore, discussing the effectiveness of
this technique in highlighting the emotional aspects of a descriptive passage also
develops the students’ emotional skills.
A topic that features prominently in a lot of student work concerns the traditional
way of getting married. Most grandmothers, as well as some of the mothers of the
students currently at university, got married between the ages of 10 and 14. Before the
educational reforms that were introduced when Sultan Qaboos came to rule Oman in
1970, the traditional ways of establishing kinship relations meant that girls were given
in marriage outside the family (Rubin, 2011). By creating equal access to education
to boys and girls, Sultan Qaboos made it possible for women to embark on careers in
all academic subjects, as well as in the army and the police. But in the old days, the
process of getting married was different. It meant that a girl had to leave her family
in order to join the household of her husband, which was a traumatic experience
for a large number of women. A lot of elderly ladies who were interviewed by their
grandchildren showed that they had never quite got over the painful aspects of the
experience. However, most of these elderly ladies showed deep gratitude because
somebody finally wanted to listen to their story.
Life-stories frequently contain unexpected turns of events. This is, for example,
illustrated by the life-story of a character, titled “Mama Kaseela.” A memorable
feature in this story, written by Hajer Al Musalhi, another female student, in January
2019, is that after mentioning her shock at being married at the age of 10, and leaving
her family at a few days’ notice, it talks about the kindness and consideration with
which the first wife of her husband introduced her to the duties of a wife. Mama
Kaseela mentions that she was terrified and upset by the abrupt and complete change
in her life. She also suffered from homesickness and loneliness at the beginning of
her married life. Her story repeats several times: “it was hard,” “it was very hard.”
As a young wife, she felt confused, upset, and treated unfairly when her husband
objected to her chatting to young boys, which had been perfectly fine before she got
married. Her confusion was increased by the fact that she did not understand what
it meant to be married, since she had not yet reached puberty and had not yet had
intercourse with her husband. It was clearly a dreadfully upsetting phase of her life.
But instead of harping on the injustice of her treatment, Mama Kaseela’s story goes
on to express deep gratitude to the first wife of her husband, because she showed
kindness and compassion, and in fact came to treat her like a daughter. The story
expresses loving respect for the woman who patiently explained what was expected
from her, and who comforted her over the loss of her family and friends.
Another notable feature of Mama Kaseela’s story is that she talks of her much
older husband with respect and fondness. She literally says: “he was a good man.”
She also expresses great love for her children and grandchildren. There is a traumatic
element to her story, but Hajer beautifully shows that the old lady looks back on her
life with gratitude. Her life-story becomes a tale of female solidarity between herself
and the first, much older, wife, which culminates in the comment that the death of her
husband’s first wife caused her incredible grief. In fact, the story explicitly mentions
that this was the only moment in her life when she shed tears.
A further topic that is regularly mentioned in student work concerns the fact that
many Omani women who grew up before 1970 made extraordinary efforts to obtain
education. Some students discovered aspects of their grandmothers about which they
had been completely unaware. They felt a sudden affinity for elderly ladies who talked
about the pain of being removed from school when their father decided it was time to
marry and have children. Many female students came to meet elderly ladies who had
devoted their energy to founding Quran schools for women or devoted their energies
to the education of women. Lamees Al Abri, for example, a female student who
attended my class in Fall 2019, wrote the moving story of “Um Aisha,” a determined
character who managed to persuade her husband to let her return to school after she
had given birth to her first and only child Aisha.
The main aim of the course I have described here is to develop professional
and life skills that can be acquired as a result of developing social and emotional
competencies. In the reflective essay, which the students had to submit at the end of
the semester, almost all of them commented that their relationship to members of
the family had improved, and some even talked about moving moments of bonding
with relatives whom they had scarcely known. By improving their emotional skills,
the course developed participants’ ability to communicate with others, regardless of
whether they belong to the same community or not.
Many students explicitly mentioned that they had gained more self-confidence as
a result of acquiring the patience and the willingness to pay attention to the non-
verbal messages that accompany human speech (facial expressions, tone of voice,
gestures and other body language). Male and female students reported that they did
not only get more confident to talk about their feelings but they also became better
at expressing what they wanted to say, the result of this being that they got better at
communicating with friends, work colleagues, and strangers.
The focus of the course on the living memory of community members, moreover,
had a positive effect on my students’ sense of identity. Several students mentioned that
they discovered a lot of hitherto unknown aspects of their own cultural background.
They noted that they did not only discover previously unknown facts about their
forebears but also gained a tangible sense of what the difficulties and rewards of
the old days of Oman had felt like. By learning to connect with the characters who
told them stories about the past, they also gained more confidence and self-esteem,
which improved their ability to communicate effectively across cultural, personal,
and generational boundaries.
Conclusion
This essay discussed the potential of the most recent results in neuroscientific studies
of emotion for designing and delivering academic courses that develop social and
emotional skills. It introduced an interdisciplinary course in Creative Cultural History
that showcases practical approaches to teaching the social and emotional skills at
the heart of intercultural competencies. This kind of course is a perfect fit in the
curriculum of interdisciplinary programs in English Studies that are motivated by
the vision of linking academic content with the tuition of communication and people
skills. It is an ideal component of English programs that employ literature courses
as a vehicle to improve their students’ understanding of human psychology, particu-

larly motivation and the rationale behind behavior. The course described here lends
itself well to developing the interpersonal and communication skills that are urgently
needed by employees and leaders not just in the cultural and educational sectors, but
also in business, human resources, public relations, marketing, and other fields.
The essay explored the potential for the academic classroom of Lisa Feldman
Barrett’s constructionist theory of emotion. In particular, it concentrated on the impli-
cations of the claim that our way of experiencing emotion is bound up with concepts,
and the stories that make sense of them (Barrett 2017, 18–19). The main emphasis,
however, was on discussing innovative practical ways of developing emotional intel-
ligence. To this end, it introduced practical exercises, such as “double listening,”
the ability to differentiate between the content of a narrative and the modalities of
delivering it.
In addition to describing one particular course, this essay suggests that a vast
range of academic courses can include components that develop their participants’
mastery of social and emotional skills. Since stories are a universal vehicle for sharing
emotional experience with a community of readers, course material that practices
storytelling techniques is well suited to this goal. Particularly relevant is course
material that discusses the ways in which stories can travel across cultural boundaries.
Since this requires course participants to explore the practical aspects of cultural
translation, it is an ideal medium for practicing the emotional skills included in
intercultural communication.
I would like to spell out at this point that the five emotional skills embraced by
the acronym RULER (Brackett et al., 2011) lend themselves perfectly to the analysis
of literature and culture (Felski, 2008). However, a shift of emphasis is required to
ensure that class discussions concentrate on identifying and analyzing the causes
and consequences of characters’ emotional experience. If such a reorientation takes
place, courses in literary and cultural studies can easily be employed as conduits
for developing the skills of recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and
regulating emotions.
This essay concludes with the observation that the process of expanding emotional
skills also cultivates open-mindedness. By developing their social and emotional
skills, students expand their ability to communicate with other people, regardless of
whether they belong to their own community or not. Social and emotional skills are
essential attributes of healthy and socially-responsible human beings. The ability to
communicate effectively across personal and cultural boundaries is a highly desir-
able attribute. It can be nurtured by familiarizing students with the culturally defined
habits and conventions of a broad range of cultural communities. A highly effec-
tive, complementary method is to teach the skill of double listening, this is to listen
deeply to other human beings. This skill easily becomes a way of life that engenders
an open-minded attitude toward cultural and individual difference. More research
is clearly required to document what precisely happens when readers, listeners, and
interviewers, concentrate on the emotions of people from different cultural back-
grounds. However, initial results suggest that this simple method has great potential
for producing graduates who will be competent at creating a healthy climate in

multicultural teams and communities.
In the globalized world of the twenty-first century, in which robots are playing
an increasingly important role, universities have to nurture the intrinsic human skills
of their graduates. If they provide the academic context for cultivating social and
emotional skills, they will produce graduates who will master intercultural commu-
nication skills, and who will thrive in collaborative projects with colleagues that
demonstrate a diverse profile and come from all parts of the world. Graduates with
sophisticated social and emotional skills will flourish in professional and private
environments, and they will, moreover, be able to contribute toward the peaceful
coexistence of diverse communities.
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Chapter 10
Universalist Pedagogy and the Future
of Literary Studies
Myles Chilton
Abstract This essay explores universalism in terms of pedagogical approaches and

processes rather than definitive critical and theoretical criteria and suppositions.
Universalism could mobilize localized imaginative frameworks to shape classroom
practices, and allay some of the present anxiety over the future of the humanities.
I believe we have to speak pragmatically of universalistic humanities education in
ways that match the public discourses STEM and business departments have at their
disposal. The risk of simplification is a necessary sacrifice toward a fuller articulation
of what universalism could mean and be developed in literary studies, a kind of meta-
pedagogy that constantly interrogates and constructs itself anew. By reviewing and
discussing potentially universalizing pedagogical tools that could help our students
think of the universal not as a result, but rather as a process of how we come to
value thinking in universalist terms, this essay addresses the stakes of thinking in
this dimension. Our future depends on our ability to make, justify, critique, and
inhabit these new worlds productively, fairly, creatively, and sustainably. We must
also consider the institution of education itself, which like literature has become a
commodity, one made increasingly vulnerable to gyrations of global capital’s battles
with global warming and pandemic. Literature will survive that, but will literary
study, and the humanities in general, still have a point?
Keywords Universalism · Humanities · Chinua Achebe · Pedagogy · Literature ·

Process
Introduction
Perhaps the most jarring moment in Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece Things Fall Apart
comes when the hero Okonkwo kills an innocent boy named Ikemefuna (1994, 61).
The rationale behind the murder is left unclear; all that we get from the narrator by
way of explanation is that the village Oracle has delivered the death sentence, and
M. Chilton (B)
Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan
e-mail: myles@mbe.nifty.com
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_10
150 M. Chilton
that Okonkwo kills Ikemefuna so as not to appear weak in front of his clansmen.
The killing is all the more upsetting because Ikemefuna, who had been given to
Okonkwo’s clan as sacrifice for a previous murder, is something of a bright spot in
the novel: he is kind, gentle, sensible, and has committed no offense; despite his
sadness at having been wrenched away from his family and village, he seems to be
settling into life in Umuofia, enjoying the companionship of his adoptive brother
Nwoye and the affectionate approval of the usually taciturn and stubborn Okonkwo.
My students are Japanese. As far as they’re concerned, the Oracle’s order is totally
unjustifiable, and the willingness of the village’s male elders to carry out the order is
appalling. They are used to a criminal justice system that, like that of many countries,
demands and depends on fairness. Innocent people must not be punished, and the
use of the death penalty, while used in Japan for murderers, is not unanimously
supported. In fact, such is the extent of some of my students’ revulsion that at this
point their sentiments toward the novel turn radically negative.
So: The seemingly arbitrary and unjust killing of an innocent boy violates the
moral sentiments of my Japanese students. I have a sneaking suspicion that they are
not alone. And now I’m going to argue in favor of squaring this monumental cultural
incommensurability with a universalist approach to literary pedagogy. But first a
word of caution: the universalism I want to probe is not the pseudouniversalism of
“Eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism” (Appiah, 1992, 58). English literary
studies circulate on a global scale an impressively diverse—and committed to diver-
sity—Euro-American critical and theoretical armature that critiques the universalist
conceits of humanism, Enlightenment, positivism, modernism, and as Gupta (2009)
points out, interrogates the implications of its colonial origins, its nationalistic insti-
tutionalization, and its potential as the study of localized receptions. Yet it never quite
shakes off a normative belief in eternal verities of beauty, truth, morality, emotion,
and other ‘timeless’ values which supposedly speak to us all, no matter what race,
gender, class, or ethnicity; or as a compendium of qualities and virtues to be appre-
hended and appreciated as part of the human condition. These beliefs have taken
any number of critical hits, with cognitive literary critics such as Hogan exposing
them as “claims of group difference made to appear as universals” (2010b, 38), and
postcolonial literary critics such as Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin illustrating how
they emerge “from particular cultural traditions which are hidden by false notions
of ‘the universal’” (1989, 11). This array of supposedly universal values and atti-
tudes, forms, and aesthetic attitudes, transcending politics and capitalistic material
acquisition, continues to infect humanities pedagogy in an effort to restore to them
a moral purpose, a push back against growing neoliberal instrumentalization on the
left hand, or Marxian theorization and progressivist identity politics on the right. And
while conservatives blame the latter for the decline of literary study, a preponderance
of evidence points to the former as one reason literary study and the humanities in
general are in a crisis.
Another universal assumption concerns the object literature itself. Space precludes
a fuller exploration of how to define literature or how to illustrate its particular differ-
ences and inter-cultural evolutions. For now, I will proceed with twinned assumptions
(themselves universalistic, and thus contestable): one, that literature forms a distinct
10 Universalist Pedagogy and the Future of Literary Studies 151
category of language, thought, representation and expression; and second, Roland

Barthes’ axiom that literature is what gets taught, a pragmatic acknowledgment of the
degree of socio-cultural determinism involved in distinguishing one type of writing
(or speaking) from another (1989, 22). It also allows for the relativity of fluctua-
tions in and arguments about the value of literature, and of those texts designated
as “literary.” Later in the essay, we will see cognitive critical approaches to literary
universals work with a more settled definition of literature.
These caveats noted, the kind of universalism I will argue for emphasizes peda-
gogical approaches and processes over definitive critical and theoretical criteria and
suppositions. Rather than universalism hovering as an abstraction, it would figure
as a concretizing and mobilizing of the localized imaginative frameworks that allow
us to think across our present time and space. A pragmatic universalism, then, one
that shapes classroom practices, and could work to allay some of the present anxiety
over the future of the humanities. I believe we have to speak pragmatically of univer-
salistic humanities education in ways that match the public discourses STEM and
business departments have at their disposal. There is a risk of simplification, but that
is a necessary sacrifice on the way to a fuller articulation of what universalism could
mean and be developed in literary studies, a kind of meta-pedagogy that constantly
interrogates and constructs itself anew. When Barthes links the identity of literature
to teaching, he also implies that teaching is itself a cultural text. How and why peda-
gogies constitute and consecrate knowledge becomes a question that itself defines
the humanities as a field with a universalizable purpose and identity, and as a collec-
tion of distinct disciplines that function in as it reflects, critiques, analyzes, and even
shapes the “real world.” We are at a moment when a certain amount of reactivity to
external pressure is unavoidable: The condition of the “real world” obliges us to pick
up literature (or other cultural work) where globalization has left it, as part of global
capital’s suite of cultural production, where older idealizations of culture (think
Matthew Arnold) no longer resonate. This means universalizing the place of literary
study in the world by rethinking literature’s function, value, affect, formal properties,
and aesthetics in terms of how to teach its values, functions, affect, aesthetic experi-
ences, and phenomenologies of reading. And as a final point in making the case: for
the humanities, and literary studies in particular, teaching is our public voice, since
very few literary critical texts or scholars seem able to speak to a broader public.
To think this through, we need to understand the marginalized place of the
literary—with “serious” reading in decline even in universities—in relation to glob-
alized erosions of economic stability, the growing gap between rich and poor, the
related belief that higher education should serve economic interests of students rather
than ‘soft’ aspirations like inner exploration, subjectivity, and changing the world for
the better. This essay will proceed by reviewing and discussing potentially univer-
salizing pedagogical tools that could help our students think of the universal not as
a result, but rather as a process of how we come to value thinking in universalist
terms. The stakes of thinking in this dimension include the place of the production,
study, and appreciation of the aesthetic objects and signifying practices that make us
human. Our future depends on our ability to make the worlds we conceive of, justify
and critique those worlds, and inhabit those worlds productively, fairly, creatively,
152 M. Chilton
and sustainably. We must also consider the institution of education itself, which like
literature has also become a commodity, one made increasingly vulnerable to gyra-
tions of global capital’s battles with global warming and pandemic. Literature will
survive that, but will literary study, and the humanities in general, still have a point?
Worlds and Universalisms
Instead of working toward or within a definition of universalism or treating univer-

sals in any literal or generic sense, I will treat universalism in the sense that some
things seem to hold over large swaths of humanity. In recent literary studies, this scale
has been approached through critical analyses of the place of the humanities in the
world, or worlds, and vice versa. As Eric Hayot observes, the concept of the world in
literary criticism is today “One of rhetorically unmatched prestige” (2012, 30), justi-
fying itself by riding wave after wave of progressivist discursive paradigms which
have followed and characterized major historical developments including decolo-
nization, the collapse of Communism, and various movements for racial, sexual
orientation, and gender emancipation. Literary critical attention to worlds stems in
part from postcolonial studies’ renewed attention to nationalism, transnationalism,
diasporic studies, multilingualism, global English, cosmopolitanism, and neoliberal
neocolonialism. Postcolonial discourses (to paraphrase Dharwadker, 2001) focusing
on understanding reassertions of national identity and nationalist ideology in turn
focus attention on Eurocentrism and the history of European colonization, particu-
larly how its residues continued to structure economic and labor exploitation and envi-
ronmental destruction. Subtending these discourses is what Ganguly calls “The noisy
presence of globalization as an intellectual exchange alley,” leading to recent atten-
tion to the world as a site of vastly increased technologically enhanced connectivity
which compels literary scholars to “radically rethink the phenomenology of literary
production, distribution, and consumption beyond national and regional boundaries”
(2015, 213).
The acceleration of globalization after the collapse of the Soviet Union revealed
the complexities of articulating multidimensional phenomena. This tended to put the
discursive focus on politics rather than aesthetics, thus bringing to the fore identarian
and ideological difference, cultural particularities, and competing historicizations. In
this context, as we have seen, universalism is usually viewed with suspicion when it
isn’t being denounced outright as a tool of Eurocentric oppression. Anti-universalism,
however, leads to what Hogan calls the puzzling contradiction of a generally leftist
theoretical preoccupation with difference—biological and cultural—finding itself in
agreement with the racism that informed colonization and which lingers as a social
reality in even the most “enlightened” societies (2010b, 38). This contradiction points
to another: that universalism in cultural or literary study necessarily opposes particu-
larism. Hogan instead sees the two as mutually reinforcing, as isolating universal
patterns often requires specific, particularized cultural and historical knowledge
because “in order to gain any understanding of cultural particularity, we necessarily
have to presuppose a background of commonality” (2010b, 40). Crucial to this under-

standing is the cultural politics of putting particularity in dialog with universalism;
in Sakai’s words, they “reinforce and supplement each other” in order to “endorse
each other’s defect in order to conceal their own” (1989, 105); that is, they reveal the
prejudices centers exercise over peripheries; Sakai’s example shows how the Ameri-
canized West assimilates the eccentricity of Japan by assuming the dominant’s terms
are a universal metalanguage with which Japan’s particularity can be diagnosed,
explained, and domesticated.
To illustrate how this dialog would proceed, let us return to Things Fall Apart.
Achebe’s narrator addresses the white, colonial or postcolonial reader who knows
little to nothing about Africa or the Igbo, adopting realism’s plain narrative style
and ethical reserve; a narrative voice that seemingly “teaches” without judgment.
But Achebe is also addressing Igbo readers, as the narrator assumes familiarity
with the village and the clan’s traditions, ceremonies, and even language (there is a
glossary, but rarely in the text are there glosses, explanations or translations). Things
Fall Apart is not a narrative of the formation of a singular character with a distinct
subjectivity, but the weaving of a narrative community comprised of characters and
action that remain deeply embedded in the local context; readers from outside that
tradition remain observers rather than participants. The issue of Ikemefuna’s killing,
and Okonkwo’s and the clan’s response to it, are kept alien; they are not addressed
to the Other, whose assent and understanding are irrelevant. Yet, there is a sense in
which this exclusion is Achebe’s way of addressing the Other, particularly the White
Other. The killing of Ikemefuna provides a pivot in the development of Okonkwo’s
characterization. From this point on his hypocrisy and violent temperament become
more apparent and more harmful. Thus, the scene of Ikemefuna’s killing punctuates
that literary development as a provocation to the Other Reader. Achebe fully realizes
how jarring and horrifying this scene is. The Other Reader has no choice but to
struggle with it, somehow reconcile it or, conversely (and more likely) continue on
in the novel feeling ever more alienated. In other words, the Other Reader has no
choice but to confront the differences in moral spheres.
Does this mean that Things Fall Apart can “work” in the space of cultural incom-
mensurability? In the “old” humanism, the purpose of literature and literary study
was to suture or estrange cultural distances; a new universalism teaches the value
of negotiating uneasy distances as a critical reading practice. To paraphrase Appiah,
this is a kind of dialogistic universalism, one that challenges monological humanism
(2001), privileging not critical orthodoxies, but rather that differences in, say, moral
spheres presupposes moral structures or plottable moral scales. The novel is neither a
nativist argument nor an appeal to the cosmopolitan Other. It criticizes Igbo nativism
in the process of representing its brutality, yet it also implicates the universalism of
the latter by refusing to offer any ethnographic rationalization.
For my students to read the novel beyond their cultural conditioning, is it enough
to simply recognize the good and bad in each context, and develop a tolerance for the
one they’re least familiar with? Would that allow my Japanese students to “accept”
or even “understand,” in the name of humanity, how the villagers can themselves
accept and understand such a thing? I could supply the short ethnographic lecture
154 M. Chilton
deliberately withheld by Achebe to “explain” the values and practices at play in this
scene in the novel. This would give me cover for a culturally relativist approach in
which I could say that, well, we all have our different ways of seeing and doing things.
What’s right for some may be wrong for others, and vice versa. After all, Japan’s
ethno-cultural nationalism often makes these kinds of claims for itself. I don’t have
to get my students to “accept” it, but I can go some way to having them understand
it. But that approach fixes the novel in the past, turns it into an object for explanation.
Understanding the cultural framework behind the killing of Ikemefuna will not bring
students out of their cultural particularity to bathe in the “universalized” stream of
literature. They may be brought into an intellectually informed space, but feelings
of revulsion and alienation remain. Cultural distance has not been bridged.
Another approach would be to have my students speculate as to how this episode
speaks to, or represents, morals and ethics that transcend a particular time and place,
to the point where all humans can see themselves in it, and it in themselves. I could
say that claims for universalism usually center on notions of shared humanity, on how
we see or sense or feel an elemental human nature beneath or riding above textual or
formal complexities. Reading is thus a means of experiencing this humanity through
the cognitive operations of a speech act or discourse, though that experience cannot
be reduced to cognition or a formally locatable system of signs and signifiers. It
works on us, somehow, someway, and some part of it is universal and immemorial.
These claims are refractions of the Romantic legacy, which has bequeathed a
notion of universality that holds that everyone everywhere can “get” the same thing
from a work of art. The blurb on the back of cover of my paperback edition of
Things Fall Apart drives home the case, insisting that while the novel is “richly
African” it nevertheless “reveals Achebe’s keen awareness of the human qualities
common to men of all times and places.” Aside from the problems of what constitutes
“African” and the sexist language, and controlling for a publisher’s promotional
excess, crowning this novel’s appeal as universal as opposed to just African at least
means that no reader should be so unaware of the human qualities that could lead
to the killing of an innocent boy. No one should be so in the dark about this moral
quality that it leads to mystified revulsion.
The Romantic legacy has softened the ground for a certain kind of reader, educated
in a certain way, time and place, and conditioned to expect and propound that literary
reading can be a transformative experience. Crucially, this transformation is supposed
to be beneficial. Being transformed from interest to revulsion to alienation to being too
disgusted to finish the book is not on the Romantic reading menu. This menu informs
the values that define English literary study, setting up an interesting set of problems
for those teaching outside the Anglosphere, where literary and cultural studies’ revo-
lutionary potential clashes with East–West dichotomizations that fetishize cultural
incommensurability, where the historical weight of globalized English cannibalizes
local languages and cultures, and where institutional and intellectual hegemonies
dictate the content of courses and police the validity of localized critical responses.
We can see this even in English studies’ attempts to world itself. The last
two decades have seen the rise of global English literature, a universalizing trend
promising a wider world, yet also leading to the opposite, a narrow specialization
on a non-traditional sub-field. Attention is shifted to literatures “other-than” Anglo-

American; such a shift retains the Anglo-American orientation, in effect providing an
alibi for maintaining that orientation. Global English also implies a flattening totality,
rather than a comparative or pluralizing framework that allows for particularity, multi-
lingualism, and the tracing of competing or marginalized literary lineages. It is, in
other words, an attempt to gather the world inside an expanded Anglo-American
canon that has often stood, in the minds of many, as a repository of universal literary
expression.
That chauvinism has been neutered somewhat, mostly by postcolonialism, which
has equipped global English with enough reflexivity to contest the political and
aesthetic premises of the canon. But when it comes to teaching Anglophone liter-
ature in the world we inhabit, well, things get tricky. Friedman notes how English
studies continue to reflect “the narrative of modernization as globalization, West-
ernization, and finally Americanization [which] remains very powerful in today’s
increasingly interlocked world” (2007, 69). If I may reference myself, I write “For
many, learning English—language and literature—remains part of the psychical
dimension of ‘catching up’ with the West, despite scholarly efforts to relativize,
provincialize, and render polycentric the study of modernities” (Chilton 2015, 76).
English observes that “the process of global massification is affirming [the disci-
pline’s] cohesion around a common core” (2012, 174). In one sense, the centering of
English literary studies in the Anglo-American canon is understandable. “After all,”
writes Hsin-ying Li, addressing the history of American literary studies in Taiwan, “if
part of the purpose of studying foreign language literature is to understand its literary
tradition and its scholarship, then the canon would be a proper starting point” (2007,
123). No one objects that the center of Japanese literary studies is the Japanese canon,
and so on.
A final word on global English is to turn its dominance on itself to contest the
worlds it makes, particularly in the asymmetrical global circulation of Anglophone
texts, theories, critical approaches, and the English language itself. Attention to its
limits allows us to see that cleansing literary study of traces of the Romantic legacy
is probably impossible, and may even be undesirable if we are to adopt universalism
as a pedagogical exploration of the potential of literary education.
Universalisms in Comparative Literary Studies
Aldridge called for comparative literature to expand itself into “universal” or world
literature (quoted in Gupta 2009, 139). Culler, seemingly echoing Aldridge’s recom-
mendation, asks “What sort of comparability, then, could guide the transformation
of comparative literature from a Eurocentric discipline into a more global one?”
(2006, 244). Neither comparative literature nor its cousins globalized literary study
or world literature are the same as universalist literary study. These disciplinary
developments do, however, suggest that the impetus to read beyond national and
other borders, and beyond disciplinary frameworks is as old as literature itself. The
156 M. Chilton
emergence of world literature, cultural, and area studies, and their validity vis-à-
vis comparative and cross-cultural reading practice have generated critical debates
beyond the scope of this essay; suffice it to say that attention to shifting scales of
meaning and interpretation could energize and reorient universalist pedagogy, though
not unproblematically.
Zhang’s work at the intersections of Anglophone, comparative and world litera-
ture offers a persuasive example of a universalism based on conceptual similarities
or thematic affinities between texts and traditions. Borrowing liberally from Jorge
Luis Borges and Northrop Frye, Zhang maintains that random connections unearthed
through comparisons of dissimilar texts is key to understanding that human creativity
is not the province of one group or tradition, that it is indeed universal, and that reading
across gaps of languages and cultures opens up perspectives closed by cultural rela-
tivism. As Zhang writes, “what appeals to the reader in a work of literature is not
pure linguistic ingenuity, either in its original form or conveyed to various degrees
in translation, but the attractiveness of its thematic content, the idea that perfectly
manifests itself in felicitous language and exquisite poetic expressions” (2007, 35–
6); this, I take to mean linguistically accessible and pleasurable without exceeding
comprehensibility.
Zhang elaborates his point through the work of George Lakoff and Mark Turner
on the presence of an apparatus of common concepts shared by members of a culture,
claiming that certain metaphors occur with uncanny similarity across cultures. These
include the metaphor of the finger and the moon, the experience of life as a journey, the
image of the pearl used to portray tears or dewdrops, and diseases of the human body
as a metaphor for the state and its corruption. It is impossible to do justice to the depth
of Zhang’s analysis of these metaphors across a range of Eastern and Western texts—
or to his arguments, pertinent here, about how the terms “Eastern” and “Western”
construct unfortunate and ultimately destructive limits on our thinking. What I want
to concentrate on is Zhang’s emphasis on the need to read at a distance. Zhang
borrows this from Northrop Frye’s metaphor for archetypal criticism, which requires
“standing back from the canvas to see the pictorial pattern and design” (2007, 55),
and from Wittgenstein’s metaphor of climbing up a ladder in search of understanding
and comprehension. We only gain this understanding and comprehension after we
first stand back or climb up to achieve “a sufficient distance from isolated individual
texts and textual details. At the same time, however, the understanding we have
gained at a critical distance allows us to return to individual texts and see them in a
new light, with a keener sensibility and greater appreciation” (Zhang, 2007, 55). It is
only through achieving distance that we can overcome “the narrow mental space of
cultural dichotomy and parochialism” (Zhang, 2007, 56), and become better readers.
Apter’s comparative work is similar, though it traces the kind of arbitrary literary
comparison favored by philosopher Alain Badiou. Apter notes that while Badiou
places no great store in comparative literature as such, he nevertheless believes in the
worth of simply comparing two texts at random because “‘great poems’ surmount
the difficulty of being worlds apart and manage to achieve universal significance”
(2006, 54). It is a comparative literature that “argues for the ability of art to release
the revolutionary possibility of an Event by making manifest Truth—a truth that
surges forth unexpectedly from art’s most ‘inaesthetic’ philosophical expression-

ism” (Apter, 2006, 54); “inaesthetic” being Badiou’s way of referring to the “‘strictly
intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of works of art’”
(quoted in Apter, 2006, 57). Badiou’s preference is for an arbitrary and inadvertently
“global” comparative reading practice that “promotes a comparative literature that
seeks out rather than shies away from parallels between languages of great discrep-
ancy” (Apter, 2006, 57). Badiou acknowledges the unavoidable “disastrousness” of
the damage translation inflicts damage on the original—distorting, eroding, altering
meaning, among other wounds inflicted—yet, poetic meaning still, despite itself,
manages to emerge. Apter pushes Badiou’s argument to cover the globe: rather than
a comparative literature that inadvertently perpetuates a colonial/neocolonial geopol-
itics of dominance by working within postcolonial arrangements of language groups
(though Apter concedes their legitimate historical and pedagogical reasons), it would
be far better to have a comparative literature that works with “linguistic contact zones
all over the world” thereby yielding “the maximum of poetic universalism” (Apter,
2006, 55).
These strengths aside, by depending on comparison, Apter and Zhang rely on
students already having a working knowledge of what a literary text is, its place in a
cultural context, and some facility with textuality, poetics, and rhetoric; knowledge
produced by a culturally specific humanities education that universalizes Romanti-
cism’s aesthetic and intellectual values. Cobham demonstrates this when she argues
that drawing parallels between Things Fall Apart and the Bible’s stories of sacri-
fice—Jesus on the cross, Abraham preparing to dispatch Isaac—offers readers a
shared archetype that makes the sacrifice of Ikemefuna “a moment of pathos rather
than one of revulsion” (1991, 95). The bonds of affection between Okonkwo and
Ikemefuna echo the bonds between God and Jesus and Abraham and Isaac, making
the act of sacrifice “a symbol of devotion to a principle higher than earthly love rather
than the brute machination of a culture incapable of elevated sentiments” (Cobham,
1991, 95). Putting Okonkwo’s action in this context thus preserves its dignity. This
is all very well for a culture attuned to Biblical stories and archetypes, not to mention
a fixed concept of dignity. Even the grounding of Cobham’s argument, the existence
of a principle higher than human love, assumes that principle will always overcome
emotion. But would this register in my Japanese classroom? I could canvas the class to
make a list of the “higher” principles that abound in Japanese religious and cultural
history. I suspect that for some of my students, the feudal roots of many of these
principles signal either a less morally and ethically evolved historical moment, or
one so morally elevated that recreating it in the present would be impossible. Or it
could be that those higher principles which may have supplied a native sense (not to
mention definition) of dignity to such a sacrifice are no longer operable. Or, if they
are operable, it is solely on an intellectual register that offers no way to ameliorate
feelings of revulsion. I note these reservations not to dismiss comparative work, but
to suggest that this impasse could provide a provocation for a number of “next steps”
in a universalist pedagogy.
158 M. Chilton
Cognitive, Patterned Universalism
Comparative poetics helps students to think across and against boundaries, but
only if they have the necessary comparative coordinates and a habit of reading—a
doubtful proposition these days. One way around this involves thinking of universals
by taking advantage of the trend toward instrumentalized English language study;
that is, thinking in terms of language and text acting upon the world as an instru-
ment of thought, made of the world as much as it makes worlds, hovering between
pre-reflective and reflective utterance, yielding patterns, and obeying the rules of
grammar. Eagleton begins The Event of Literature by asking, once again, what is
literature? Is a universal definition necessary, or does literature, no matter how hard
we try, always crumble into a mess of viewpoints, contingent and historical? Wittgen-
stein, as Eagleton tells us, believes not. Rather, we can cut through the universal versus
particular dilemma by thinking in terms of family resemblances. In Philosophical
Investigations Wittgenstein prompts us to think of what games have in common.
What we find is that there is no single thing: rather, there is “a complicated network
of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (Wittgenstein, 1986, 32), just like a
family. There will be noticeable traits shared by some, or only one or two, or a similar
trait, or traits will be combined, and so on. Literary theorists like this idea: New says
“all literary discourses would resemble some other literary discourse in one way, but
they would not resemble each other in a single way” (quoted in Eagleton 2012, 21).
Family resemblance can be stretched too far to include everything and mean
nothing: “A tortoise resembles orthopaedic surgery in that neither can ride a bicycle”
(Eagleton 2012, 23). On the other hand, if we use it to frame empirical categories,
not theoretical ones, we see that the notion is dynamic, allowing of hybrids, anoma-
lies, weirdness, and surprise. One might conclude that Wittgenstein is saying there
is nothing essential about literature. According to Eagleton, Stanley Cavell says,
actually, Wittgenstein is trying to nail down essence as that which is explained in
grammar, which for Wittgenstein, means “the rules that govern the way we apply
words which tell us what a thing is” (Eagleton 2012, 22). And as “A grammar is a set
of rules for organising a world of meaning... fiction is a working model of grammars
in general, a place where we can observe their operations in exceptionally graphic,
condensed form” (Eagleton 2012, 160–61). Literary fiction composes itself from an
arbitrary and autonomous set of rules and conventions governing intelligibility and
believability, emerging through within a web of social history.
As a model of grammar, repetition and patterns are unavoidable. This takes us
to Bod and his claim that pattern-seeking characterizes literary reading and inter-
pretation. Pattern seeking is “timeless and ubiquitous” because it is “about trying
to make a meaningful distinction between fortuitous and non-fortuitous patterns”
(Bod, 2013, 10) in grammar, syntax, semantics, dialect, and in themes, structures,
resonances, and morality. It is the “good” in the notion that studying literature is
good for you: it helps you see patterns, translate them into other patterns, adapt
them, reorganize, or re-purpose them. You match the fictional pattern to the patterns
you see in reality, to see that this “matching” is itself patterned thought, represented
in literary texts and other kinds of verbal constructs. Patterns and grammars are there
in the imagination of the creator, and in the reader or viewer. This is the reality we
intersect with when we read a poem, novel, when we see a play or a film. Just as
when we see or encounter patterns in real life and try to make sense of them, we
do so in artworks. Even deconstruction, in the end, acknowledges patterns: even in
rejecting the universal validity of patterns, underpinning this stance is the stability
of the pattern that every text allows polysemic reading and multiple interpretations.
The pedagogic yield of humanities, insights into our culture and its values, and in
turn our humanity, is deeply embedded in this work. Moreover, it shows how the
humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences can be linked in a common
history of meaning and knowledge making. Pattern seeking allows for deeper and
wider comparative work at the level of methods and patterns, and overcomes presen-
tism, allowing us to project present-day conceptions of the humanities back to their
roots across histories and geographies.
Some may object that Bod is simply reworking formalism, or worse, structuralism.
In a way, yes, he is. But the residual influence of these theoretical movements supports
the idea that pattern-seeking is essentially what we’re up to. The formalists analyzed
literary works for internal regularities of style and effect, treating them as autonomous
and not subject to psychology or context or external laws that determined textual
production. Narratology and structuralism, too, were criticized for neglecting the
position of the reader. Some would add that they never overcame the problem of
reducing the concept of beauty to mean a particular form; implying that when we
teach “beauty” we’re training students what the prevailing expectations are in any
cultural moment/milieu. If there is anything “transcendental” about the artwork,
then it refers to abstract themes outside of cultural histories. What this misses is
literary or other modes of affect as a kind of non-subjective aesthetic experience that
puts emotion into the apprehension of beauty, calling attention to the recurrence of
powerful human experiences—loss, redemption, and so on—across historical and
cultural horizons. These kinds of experiences by their nature are not abstract; they
have to be made concrete, which is what the work of art attempts, and which our
pedagogy seeks to explain.
To make them concrete, we need rules—grammar, again. We balk at such talk
because of the legacy of Romanticism, which tells us that literature, indeed all art,
is a rebuke or a refuge from utility, industry, and instrumentalization. But invoking
grammars and patterns does not mean that art is a function, or a product of utility, or an
instrument. Art is also not just a solely hermeneutic understanding of unique events, in
contrast to the sciences being about explaining universals. Post-structuralism taught
us that the position of the interpreter is based on patterns, as are the objects being
interpreted. Objects shift and change just as we do; and we recognize shifts and
changes because they push against and break the boundaries. We know this because
we know the boundaries, and the boundaries of the boundaries, the rules that produce
the rules. We can trace them methodically, comparatively, historically, and coherently,
without forsaking attention to variety, tradition, invention, agency, creativity, and
artistry.
160 M. Chilton
This is the special value of literary study—and the humanities as a whole. The
methodical tracing becomes a pedagogy not in a disciplinary framework consisting
of “repositories and delivery systems for relatively static content” (Carter, quoted
in Carillo, 2019), but an active way of knowing which shifts from “‘the teaching
of literature as information about genres, poetic forms, images and metaphors’” to
an “‘exploration of how a reader’s mind interacts with a text to compose mean-
ings’” (Salvatori, quoted in Carillo, 2019). Such a shift, argues Carillo, “supports
a more overt and deliberate engagement with the generalizable principles of how
interpretation works” (2019).
It would be mechanical, but it would also be performative and creative in addition
to being analytical and critical. And it would be meta-critical, never losing sight of
how coursework can help us think of what may be universal. Assignments could, for
instance, center themselves around investigations of Cave’s claim that literature is
“a collective activity, an enduring feature of the way humans share their cognitive
environment” (2016, 3). The class could then put literary-cultural study in dialog
with neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. The worlds represented
in literature have essentially the same physical properties and sensorimotor laws as
the world we live in, literary uses of language are continuous with everyday uses
and lived realities which are quite different. Literature, then, acts upon the world as
an instrument of thought, made of the world as much as it makes worlds, a textual
presence astride or enmeshed within it. It is a mutating archive of human thought
and feeling, requiring participation and “reciprocal acts of imaginative thought,” not
to mention embodied, making literature “in the broad sense... the most far-reaching
and enduring vehicle and instrument of human thought, the most revealing product
and symptom of human cognition” (Cave, 2016, 14).
Some of the most influential work in the universalism of cognitive literary studies
has been done by Hogan. He argues that “universals are features of works in that
domain that recur across genetically and areally unrelated traditions than would
be predicted by chance” (2016). He then breaks them down into a taxonomy of
universals, which includes absolute universals, meaning “a particular feature is found
in every tradition” (2016); statistical, meaning a pattern that occurs across cultures
with seemingly disproportionate frequency; typological, referring to those statistical
universals that occur in correlational patterns; and indexical, which I believe is the
most pedagogically interesting kind of universal, as these are instances of important
categories of experience or being, such as religion, nationality, or gender, which vary
in occurrence and importance in relation to the position of the reader or viewer.
This is the kind of universalism that postcolonialists work with. Hogan refer-
ences Nandy’s similar division between homogenized universalism, which rejects
the value of cultural particularity, and distinctive civilizational universalism, “which
connects universals with their cultural particularizations, affirming the value of both
the universal and particular components of cultural practices” (2016). Overall, all
of these conceptions of universalism reject the normative sense of universals, and
argue for distinguishing “universal” from “recurring feature” while resisting claims
for aesthetic or other kinds of superiority of one cultural particularity over another,
especially for those cultural products, like blockbuster films, that appeal across a
wide range of cultures. These conceptions also, as Hogan points out, are not biolog-
ically innate; they are, rather, “the product of complex interactions among biology,
the physical environment, childhood development, group dynamics, etc.” (2016).
One way to understand this is that child rearing is a universal practice, but different
cultures do it in different ways. These conceptions also, therefore, do not imply
direct, cross-cultural comprehensibility. As Hogan puts it, “The specification of a
universal pattern is almost certain to involve many culturally specific features that
may be entirely opaque to readers unfamiliar with that tradition” and even to some
within if they have had little exposure to “their” literary or cultural tradition (2016).
Hogan’s cognitive approach to literary universals homes in on the role of narrative
in the formation of moral response. As he says,
A moral response involves some elaborative thought, some developed reflection on the
problem at hand. That elaborative thought usually comprises an understanding or imagination
of our own past and potential action, the actions of other people, the actual or possible
outcomes of our actions and their actions, etc. In keeping with the particularity of such
imagination, our practical moral thought is less a matter of logical inference and more a
matter of narrative—the simulation of people engaged in actions, with beginnings, middles,
and ends. (2010a, 24)
Narrative begins with language, and language, to make sense, to mobilize

meaning, needs grammar. Grammar, again, means patterns. Patterns suggest that
the goal of teaching is locating or imposing coherence on a text. But the teacher-
expert resists composing coherence; coherence, rather, is produced collectively, from
students, for students, in a way that recognizes contingencies, biases, subject posi-
tions, gaps in knowledge, and affect. Exploring meaning lurking within or underneath
a thicket of words may reveal something banal, or a text’s historically and canoni-
cally celebrated meaning may turn out to be much ado about nothing, or it may be
unexpectedly engaging, or puzzling, or complex. There is no goal, only the process
of exploration, the becoming of and within literature. Not willy-nilly or impression-
istically: as Cave reminds us, while literary study is not an exact science, “it aims at
precision” based on “verifiable textual and other evidence” to produce “probabilistic
rather than apodeictic” (2016, 21) arguments, thus as a discipline it is not essentially
different in kind from any other.
But not exactly like other disciplines. I want to conclude this section with a brief
warning that cognitive approaches to literary universalism work under the sign of
phenomenologies of reading, and not the attempts to universalize literature through
a kind of regulation under the banner of the positivistic sciences. Literary scholars
working with digital technology, psychology, evolutionary theory, neuro- and cogni-
tive science (as we have seen) have increased the scope and resilience of the knowl-
edge claims on which literature is produced, consumed, and circulated. But the
advantages of this kind of work are not of the kind voiced by conservative critics
who believe that literary study has surrendered its influence under the weight of
so much “obscurantist dogmatism and... coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism”
162 M. Chilton
(Boyd, 2006), usually meaning Marxian poststructuralism, feminist, gender, or ethnic

studies. Scientific knowledge, biological in particular, is seen as a way to stiffen and
rescue literary criticism from the circularity and insularity that has rendered it point-
less. As Rónán McDonald points out, “neurobiology can explain the neural activity
involved in aesthetic experience or moral judgements, it will not help us to understand
the subjective force of aesthetics or moral judgements” (2015a, 246).
A Final Polemic
McDonald cautions that humanities or scholars in the humanities should not, when
making their case to a nonspecialist public, lapse into “simplistic polemics and
apologias” or “ventriloquizing the idiom of marketing managers and administra-
tors” (2015b, 2). Instead, in stressing that there is no single literary studies, no single
literary value, we highlight the dynamic variety of diverse perspectives embraced
implicitly and explicitly. The value of literary studies is that literature, “considered
as a synecdoche of human culture and imagination” (2015b, 4) summons values
from within literary texts themselves. McDonald echoes Cave in seeing literature
as a particular way of thinking manifesting itself as a “special or distinct form of
writing, singular and marked out from other texts and linguistic forms” and working
within a “phenomenology of reading together with a strong sense of history and
situatedness” (Cave, 2016, 6–7).
This means we must not be shy about universalism—the right kind of universalism.
The literary studies’ classroom that works toward universalism by starting from fact
that story-telling, in both its written and spoken forms, is as old as humanity, and has
played a crucial role in creating, shaping, and regulating civilizations. Then someone
somewhere thought studying literature was a good idea. That “goodness” was, to be
sure, historically conditioned, but it took on a seemingly benign, humanistic sense of
the good which has underpinned literary teaching ever since. But the good has never
really been articulated in a convincing way to the public, and thus is not shared by
the public, voting as it has been doing with its feet.
Putting the very question of universalism into the classroom provokes students to
grapple with multiple formulations of the world and its effects on their learning, and
their place in the world. By supplanting vague notions of universalism with the histor-
ical circulation of narratives that inform the moral and aesthetic visions of disparate
cultures, we can ask, for instance, how is it that Japanese and Canadian students
come to share feelings of horror and revulsion, and a similar sense of injustice? This
inquiry brings into play the historical and interdisciplinary constitution of culture,
while challenging notions of consistently clear coordinates of self-fashioning that
allow for culture to be spatialized to the point where we can talk of similar, different,
disparate, and opposite. The point of this pedagogy is not simply to identify these
patterns, but to emphasize the historico-geographic pervasiveness of artistic, verbal,
and material creativity, the human need for the formalized, symbolic and representa-
tional patterning of existence, and the potential for this knowledge and understanding
to effect change. This knowledge and mode of understanding are especially impor-
tant in the present historical moment, when creativity is co-opted by globalized
neoliberalism, and the related phenomenon of the humanities struggling to maintain
a significant presence in institutions of higher learning.
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Part II
On Language and Culture
Chapter 11
When They See Us: Using Texts
of Affirmation in the Global Literature
Classroom
Kirsten Hemmy
Abstract Although diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives abound in contempo-

rary higher education, rendering antiracism the latest academic trend, truly equitable
approaches to world literature have changed very little in the last decades. The stan-
dard and enduring pedagogical view of world literature is linear and emanates from
the Eurocentric and imperial gaze. The term world literature originated from the
German weltliteratur, from Goethe, who declared quite excitedly and assuredly the
end of an adherence to a national literature and the dawn of a new era of a truly global
literature, one in which the whole spectrum of literature could exist and be appre-
ciated. When Goethe declared the advent of this era in the 1820s, he was reading a
Chinese novel in translation, and could see a universe of possibilities in literary studies
that encompassed the world. The way we view literature is ultimately tied to the way
we view the world. The dominant prototype for the world literature classroom begins
with Western literature, ever-situated atop its own socially and politically constructed
perch, and includes a whirlwind tour of global texts, a comparative diffusionist or
economicist literary sampling from across a singular and linear space and time but
ultimately viewing Western literature as exemplar and all non-Western texts as Other.
Critics of this model (Cassanova, Moretti) may refer to the gross inequities of the
world literary system, to the injustice and short-sightedness of tying capitalism to an
understanding of literature, but still ultimately depend upon a Eurocentric approach
to what literature can mean and do. Thus, much of the critique of the world literature
system calls for an empowering of “marginal” literatures and a reconfiguration of
the hierarchy. It does not, however, aim to deconstruct the system nor to envision
new models based on equity. This paper seeks to investigate current models of world
literature that critique eurocentrism and make space for pluralistic approaches to
valuing world literature on its own terms, specifically using bell hooks’ model for
education and applying her ideologies to the global literature classroom.
Keywords Global literature · Canon · Indigeneity · bell hooks · Liberation

pedagogy
K. Hemmy (B)
Mount Mary University, Milwaukee, United States of America
e-mail: kirstenhemmy@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_11
168 K. Hemmy
Introduction
“The first question is: Can learning take place if in fact it silences the voices of the
people it is supposed to teach? And the answer is: Yes. People learn that they don’t
count” (Giroux, 1992, p. 15). When the writer Clint Smith first came into academia,
he “fell victim to the fear of wanting to create an apolitical space in the classroom”
(Smith, 2017a, b, n.p.). Revisiting Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers” reminded him
that the pedagogical strategy of not speaking about certain things in the classroom is
always a political decision. What we refuse to discuss with our students is an absence
that builds into a pedagogical presence and a presence for them, too. Students’ lives
are affected by political decisions every day, and our responsibility as educators and
learning facilitators is to create safe spaces for our students to work through the
messy political decisions that do brush up against their lives.
I plan every semester with this idea in mind. As someone who feels teaching is
a calling but that its effectiveness can be learned, I try to consider what bell hooks
has said about liberated teaching, how “teachers must be actively committed to a
process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach
in a manner that empowers students” (15).
I also think of what Baldwin said in his 1963 “A Talk to Teachers,” that:
the purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for
himself, to make his own decisions… What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which
will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to
perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society
and try to change and fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the only hope that society has.
This is the only way societies change (n.p.).
Baldwin’s, Giroux’s, and hooks’ musings ring true to most academics, I think,
who view themselves as conduits between the world inside the classroom and the
larger world beyond the university. These days, there is a great deal of attention being
paid to concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion, ideas that remained outside of
classrooms and conversations in higher education for too long. One could argue
that the reason for this sudden interest in these ideas isn’t that it’s high time, but
rather because that chicken has come home to roost: institutionalized racism and
imperialism remain dividers by which racial and imperial entities continue to create
enduring hierarchies throughout the world; this reality is apparent in global youth
activist movements, responses to enduring brutalities and inequities that pit white
supremacy and “the West” against all else.
In Teaching to Transgress (1994), hooks articulates a philosophy of liberation,
which is also a philosophy of teaching and of classroom pedagogy, through an
understanding that students who feel marginalized outside the classroom will often
experience marginalization inside, as well. An advocate for reflective learning and
teaching, hooks shows that students can learn to think critically only when they are
able to transgress boundaries created both institutionally and personally for them:
racial, sexual, class, regional, religious. This paper uses the major tenets of hooks to
11 When They See Us: Using Texts of Affirmation … 169
rethink the global literature classroom, and particularly, the global literature class-
room in Oman: education as a practice of freedom; human liberation that begins in
the classroom and with a holistic education that respects culturally relevant issues
of gender, race, class, and history. The global literature classroom in Oman is built
upon a relevant pedagogy that focuses on the ultimate needs of students, and their
personal and collective well-being. Freedom in education, which is, to be clear,
radical pedagogy and radical teaching, is about education and knowledge, how we
offer students the opportunity to participate in the production and process of educa-
tion. We work with students as collaborators, sometimes as learners, by which I mean
instructors must earnestly attempt to move aside, to view themselves as a participant
in the process. In the transformative classroom, one free from hierarchical notions
of teacher and student, the classroom can be liberatory for all those involved in the
learning process, even the institution itself.
Background to Literary Higher Education
I want the work I do as a professor to reflect my commitment to self-actualization

and to social change, and I hope that it is evidenced in my empowering students as
they learn to challenge their worldviews and the world. When I first began teaching
in the Sultanate of Oman, it was by way of a two-year teaching fellowship in Senegal
and a tenured position at a private, historically Black university (HBCU). I’d been
fortunate, but willfully ignorant of my good fortune, to teach in departments whose
course and text offerings suited the students they taught, offering strong literary
foundations that simultaneously affirmed student identities. These were university
settings where I felt comfortable and comforted, my ability to be radical at no risk
to myself, supported in my course and text offerings as I was by my superiors and
peers. I was obviously doing very little that was revolutionary: I may have been
empowering students, but it was because I was a member of a faculty that designed
and then upheld the student journey to empowerment. I joined a university that was
Afrocentric in its curriculum, that created a safe place for Black students to grow and
to learn, and later joined a university in Senegal that used African literary texts to
teach about history, about literature, and to support a sense of self- and community
empowerment. I came to those spaces and taught what was already being taught.
Happily, but without the introspection hooks advises.
In higher education, decisions around what to teach in the literature classroom are
not easy and are often influenced by university, college, and department administra-
tive oversights, antiquated course descriptions, too-traditional department offerings,
and even financial considerations. In a global higher educational setting, these deci-
sions could be further affected by very large class sizes, access to texts, cultural
considerations and more (Palak & Yildiz, 2015). Formal education in the form
of higher education assumes great significance as many countries are transiting
into Knowledge Economies (Bottery, 1999). The building of knowledge economies
through the spreading of globalization has had a significant effect on developing
170 K. Hemmy
education. In the Sultanate of Oman, a very young country in terms of its higher
education, there are distinct challenges in the literature classroom. In Oman, where
almost 65 percent of the population is younger than 30, and where higher education
has existed for only the last thirty-five years, the effort to build quality universi-
ties and academic programs in the region has existed since 1996, when a royal
decree was issued to promote the development of higher education institutions in the
country. Oman’s government offers land for the construction of new campuses, subsi-
dized loans, grants for acquiring learning resources, and pays the tuition of Omani
students from families receiving social welfare as well as top-performing national
students who qualify academically (Hemmy & Mehta, 2021). Government subsi-
dies have helped both the private and public sector of degree-granting institutions to
increase visibility and access to degree programs. Further, the assistance provided by
the government makes higher education a potential for nearly every young Omani
(Al Lamki, 2002, qtd. in Hemmy & Mehta, 2021). In theory, higher education in
the Sultanate is already liberatory, given its accessibility to all who would like it.
However, the education system at large has continued to face numerous challenges,
especially along the lines of equipping students with critical thinking, knowledge,
and skills (Al Mahrooqi, qtd. in Hemmy & Mehta, 2021). In recent years, disciplines
perceived as liberal arts have come under critique for their perceived inability to
respond to current social, economic, and political challenges. In particular, the role
of the Humanities, and of English Literary Studies, has been called into question for
its ability to train and equip majors for the job market. This question is a valid one.
Like every other place I’d taught before, when I arrived at the national university
in Oman, I was given courses to teach and told in a general way how I should teach
them. I was given other faculty members’ syllabi as guides. In those days, while
our courses had descriptions, they were vague and outdated. Courses didn’t yet have
outcomes, as they do now. Despite all my years of teaching, my concerted efforts at
being an involved and evolved instructor, I wasn’t sure how to teach my courses. The
courses had very familiar names, and indeed, our department curriculum was very
standardly Western, but I wondered what this meant. Late in arriving to the semester,
to the country, I decided to proceed according to the notes I’d been given. I used the
Norton Anthologies and for my longer fiction classes, choose from among what was
available in our department library offerings, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter. We cannot
predict the consequences of our teaching practices, a fact that produces anxiety and
even a continuous cycle of questioning, reconfiguring, and self-doubt. What can it
mean when students do not engage with a text? How to find out given the power
dynamics of the classroom, the very limited space available for real reflection and
sharing on the part of the student? During my first semester of teaching in Oman, I
was aware that I was not always reaching students. It seemed obvious that The Great
Gatsby was very nominally interesting to them, that they couldn’t connect with any
of the characters, but that matters in both Things Fall Apart and So Long a Letter
gave them much to talk and think about. Never have I felt so out of touch as during
my American Literature I course at Sultan Qaboos University, when I had to talk
about what early Americans thought and felt and how this impacted early American
literature. It seemed so irrelevant.
Unsurprisingly, my student evaluations were not glorious. But students saw some-
thing that became important to my pedagogy and praxis: they enjoyed neither The
Great Gatsby nor Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, but more impor-
tantly, they recognized that I was dispassionate as well. “How can we be expected
to be inspired by the readings when the instructor makes clear that she doesn’t even
like it?” one particularly insightful student asked. A very good point, to be honest.
The next semester I started with hooks, with Baldwin, with Freire and with Edward
Said. I wanted us all to learn what learning can be. And then to begin, from there. I
constructed my global literature classes to begin and end with student choices. Tech-
nically, after our liberation readings, we begin with Goethe, then move to Damrosch,
and then we reconfigure the center. What is literature to Oman? How does and has
Omani literature moved into the realm of global text? How does it gain in translation,
in its movement (Damrosch, 2003)?
Saif Al Rahbi (b. 1956), is an Omani poet, essayist and writer, born in a village
called Suroor. He is a student favorite, a place of connection, and despite being a
contemporary poet, a place from which we often begin. Al Rahbi’s poetry touches
students deeply, not only for its connectedness to Oman, for its nostalgia for land,
people, culture, but perhaps for how it represents what Caton (XXX) and others
call emergent culture. Emergent culture is defined as a type of reconceptualization
of cultural norms within the framework of the preexisting set of cultural resources
(Eldridge, 59–60). The shift is predicated upon previous normative culture but shows
fundamental shifts in ideology and practice. Certain events, ones that have massive
impact on society in general, will more strongly lead to a general restructuring of
practices and institutions (Caton, 261). Oman, the oldest independent state in the
Arab world, once stretched across the Arabian Gulf, reaching as far as Zanzibar and
East Africa in the eighteenth century. In 1970, a new era began with the rule of Sultan
Qaboos bin Said, changing into a prosperous nation focused on education, culture,
the arts, and development, with a constitution that made clear human rights, rights for
citizens, rights for women and children, and a strong social welfare system designed
to support Omanis into the future (Hemmy & Mehta, 2021).
The strong mountain is staring at me
By telescope
As it is asking me
“Are you still here?
Your stay is becoming long”.
My students like the mountains, always there, as they are always visible in Oman,
a part of the landscape. We talk about what they mean to them. In the beginning,
it’s that they’re mountains, but I ask students to ask their parents, their sisters and
brothers and grandparents their impressions about the mountains. They come back
with more: they are ancient. They know everything about us. The Prophet understood
geology and explained them, as Allah explained it to him. They are where we go with
our families.
172 K. Hemmy
A student explains that his grandfather used to travel to a town about 200 km
away from where they lived. He walked, as it was the 1960s, and that was the only
mode of transportation. “He used the mountains as a guide, as a refuge, as shade
from the sun. The light against the mountains told him what time of day it was. He
can still tell you how far away Nizwa is today when we travel by car, by looking at
the mountains. They never change. It’s like we know them, and they know us.”
I know you write about me
You are born under my dark shadows.
(al Rahbi).
Canon
According to Thompson (1988) and Abrams (2014), what we mean by the Amer-
ican literary canon is the set of authors and texts generally included in courses and
discussions of American literature, those readings we’ve come to expect to find in
anthologies and surveys. What we mean by the English literary canon is sometimes
also conflated with the Western canon, those texts in English that serve as a roadmap
by which all those who study English come to know the same texts. Lauter (1983)
reminds us that though there is no canon committee deciding what goes in and what
is left out, the canon’s influence is undeniable, matching the larger social concerns
of patriarchal, white supremacist society. The canon “encodes a set of social norms
and values; and these, by virtue of its cultural standing, it helps endow with force
and continuity. Thus, although we cannot ascribe to a literary canon the decline in
attention to the concerns of women in the 1920s, the progressive exclusion of literary
works by women from the canon suggested that such concerns were of lesser value
than those inscribed in canonical books and authors” (Lauter, p. 485). The literary
canon is a means by which culture validates social power.
There’s this idea of the literary canon—and of traditional education models in
general—that what’s been time-tested is itself evidence of its excellence. Meaning
that what’s been around for a long time will continue to be. Talib (2012) popularized
the Lindy effect heuristic to explain that books that have been around for many years
only gain in their greatness: that the expected life of a book is proportionate to its past
life. William Deresiewicz said in a 2009 speech to the incoming class at West Point
that great books, the Great Books, “the ones you find on a syllabus, the ones people
have continued to read…say things that have the permanent power to disrupt our
habits of thought” (qtd. in The American Scholar, 2010). According to Deresiewicz,
and to many of our contemporaries, the books that comprise the literary canon “were
revolutionary in their own time, and they are still revolutionary today” (2009).
The word canon contains a multitude; it is global in its origins, its etymology.
While the word canon in its earlier forms—Sumerian gi, Latin canna and Arabic
qanu—referred to something that stabilizes or is standard, the word in its Greek form
appears in Aristotle as a thing we measure ourselves against: “…we understand
the straight and the crooked by the same method: the kanon is the test for them
both—but neither the crooked nor the straight provides its own proof” (Nicomachean
Ethics 1138a26-35). Interestingly, Aristotle also perceived the problems in having a
canon, noting the slippage between description and prescription and that standards
of judgment will need to be changed for different circumstances, especially in search
of what is equitable: “Just as that kanôn does not stay the same but is reshaped to
the curve of a stone, so too a vote/ordinance is made to fit the affairs at hand. This
makes it clear what equitable is, that it is just, and that it is better than certain kinds
of justice” (Nicomachean Ethics 1138a26-35). Plutarch also offered caution for the
canon, that the canon could demarcate what’s inside as exemplary, unintentionally
demarcating what’s outside the canon as lacking: the young should understand when
we urge them to read poems not to have such high beliefs about them and their
impressive names because they believe that they are wise and just men, the best
kinds and models [kanons] of virtue and rightness” (How to Study Poetry, 25e).
Fast forward nearly two millennia and Aristotle and Plutarch are firmly in any list
of the Western canon, having influenced literature for generations. Until the 1980s,
the Culture Wars helped to provide slightly greater representation in the canon—
mainly white women—though it can hardly be called representative. By the time
I declared an English major in the 1990s, Harold Bloom had reignited the debate
about the canon and what exactly it should or does represent with his important
text on the Western Canon (1994), which remarkably, only focused on 26 authors.
Only four are women, and all the authors are white (two are Latin American white
writers). Yes, but that’s Harold Bloom, you groan, unapologetic defender of white
males and Great Books who once declared “Shakespeare is God.” Or maybe this
points to the universal prejudice against women and toward whiteness. If we search
recent “Best Of” lists, they are still dominated by white men and women. These
days, there are more lists and more diversity within them. What’s happened is that
the canon has expanded, making more room for women and writers of color, for
more experimental writing, but even this has its detractors, some within and others
outside of, the academy.
Global Literature
If you read through Goethe’s musings on Weltliteratur (1807, 1825, 1827, 1828),
you find that the German writer was calling for an expansion of national literature
into global literature even before canons were named thusly. In his journal Kunst und
Altertum (Art and Antiquity), Goethe (1828) writes that “left to itself every literature
will exhaust its vitality if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a
foreign one. What naturalist does not take pleasure in the wonderful things that he
sees produced by reflection in a mirror?” (quoted in Damrosch 2003: 7).
As Goethe was beginning to formulate his ideas about world literature, he was
reading a Chinese novel. Chinese novels were central to Goethe’s developing the idea
of world literature. By the last decade of Goethe’s career, three such romances had
been translated into European languages. All evidence indicates that he had read them
174 K. Hemmy
intensely in search of material and inspiration for his own poetic creativity. Three
translations: The Pleasing History (1761), Chinese Courtship in Verse (1824), and
Les Deux Cousines (1826) provided the impetus for Goethe’s search for connections
between Asian and European literature (Purdy 2020).
A critical pedagogy (Freire, 1971) requires seeing injustices everywhere, in order
to right them anywhere. This begins with the global text, and I believe that Goethe
would have agreed. Smith (2017a, b) clarifies that a critical pedagogy is a way to see
your students, their lived experiences, their realities, their potentials, their trauma,
and that you allow space for that, that you don’t shy away and refuse to engage with
it, to allow them space and support to sort through it in order that you form a bridge
by which students are able to engage with the world on their own terms:
I realized that rigorous lessons were not mutually exclusive from culturally and politically
relevant ones. Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” did not have to be sacrificed in order to make
room for a discussion on community violence. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” did not have
to be abandoned in order to tackle immigration. “A Talk to Teachers” showed me that a
teacher’s work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical, and, instead, confront the
problems that shape our students’ lives (2017).
Ultimately, what we do and say in our classrooms, the texts we choose and how
we speak about them, how we engage with authorship and identity and agency shapes
how students view the world, the literary world, and their own spaces in the world.
Kessler (2019) bemoans the expansion of the canon, fretting that university
students would be subjected to brainwashing, forcing them to become SJWs and
“woke” instead of properly educated. In particular, he was opposed to Stanford’s
“manipulation” by teaching a novel about “the plight of the urban Native Amer-
ican.” He was also dismayed that a book on Silicon Valley highlighted its enduring
inequalities and gentrification rather than focusing on its wealth and innovation. In
the same month, poet Bob Hicok published an essay mourning the end of poetry, in
particular his own growing irrelevance as a white writer. Hicok (2019) says, “I write
this because I’m dying as a poet. My books don’t sell as well or get reviewed as
much as they used to.” Using tired tropes of reverse racism and the disappearance of
the white man, he continues:
…emotionally I’m crushed that I’m disappearing as a poet, ethically I find it necessary and
don’t know how to put the two together. It’s weird to stand near what I believe is the end
of the kind of control men like me have held, hoping it is the end, trusting there’s nothing
about any kind of human that gives them value greater than any other kind. …Weird to both
love and hate this state of affairs (https://www.utne.com/arts/new-american-poetry-zm0z19
uzhoe).
Kessler and Hicok’s musings are representative of how many white writers and
those scholars who uphold notions of the classical and the canonical think and feel.
And this is the continuous threat: when we reify the belief that the canon refers to the
best rather than the truth which is the proximity of most of those writers to power and
privilege, this perpetuates the notion that white, primarily western and male authors
and critics are those with the best prose, the most perceptive and important voices and
therefore, those who are most worthy of our study. As we continue to teach course offer-
ings in the white and Western literary canon, the message for all students globally is
that these are the best voices, rendering other communities, voices, stories and histo-
ries less important, less worthy of study and praise. It is hegemony that asks us to lessen
our imagination, limiting us to only consider broadening the canon rather than disman-
tling the hierarchy altogether (Halberstam, 2013). In the year 2022, many scholars and
administrators seem to misunderstand what hooks was calling for. Engaged pedagogy
establishes a mutual relationship between teacher and students that nurtures the growth
of both parties, creating an atmosphere of trust and commitment that is always present
when genuine learning happens (hooks, 2009).
The Global Classroom
I think of the classroom as a laboratory, all of us engaged in the experiment. In most

of my classes, I am teaching literature, and I am fortunate that, also in most of my
classes, my students are interested in studying it. They are motivated by an interest
in reading, in literature, in continuing to hone their English skills around discussions
of the literary text. These days, there is a growing concern about how this study
translates to the job market, and my students feel this, but also generally feel that
it’s the economy that gets it wrong: literature is important, still. In this near-perfect
classroom, then, what is the experiment? What are its goals? Where are we going
and why? Perhaps the destination is a kind of shared belief, a notion that literature,
that the text, when correctly chosen, can inspire learners to look within, to better
understand their world and their own possibilities within it (Sumara, 2002).
Guillory (1993) argues that we continue to uphold and pass on the literary canon
to maintain our investment in cultural capital: that the canon of course passes on the
literature itself, but of importance is what else it passes on, an ideology of social
class, paradigmatic ideas of culture and civilization. There are some radical ways to
address the problem, and these certainly have their merits. I’m of the mind that both
approaches are necessary at this point, because perhaps the extreme is necessary for
gatekeepers to do anything. But we don’t need to burn the discipline down or do
away with all of the literary canon. I think if we are working sincerely to decolonize
our English departments, then we must be working to decolonize the world.
Giroux (2011), Amsler (2011), and Levidow (2002) argue that what is needed
in higher education is a resistance to neoliberalism, that a new system rooted in
social justice and equity would create diverse conditions, critical democracy and
even liberation not only amongst college students but within society itself (Shahjahan,
2014). This is the case in the humanities, exceptionally so in the field of English,
fraught as it is with notions of the imperial and colonial. We don’t need to let the
discipline burn, but it’s at risk of imploding if we don’t make changes. Change within
the discipline, within the department, can be made through banalities, beginning with
the fundamental ways we think about liberation politics and knowledge production
as well as plunder in everyday life and how that informs what we read and who writes
our texts. The publishing industry is largely white (Jimenez and Beckert, 2019). The
canon remains largely white. My students are of Arab, Asian and African descent. I
176 K. Hemmy
must ask myself what values I want them to discover in the texts we use, and why.
We must think about how to help our students assemble a toolkit that enables them to
critically engage in the solitary modalities of literary study, of writing and research.
We can turn our focus away from the western literary canon, do away with our
ongoing colonial relationship to the forefathering oppressors, and introduce students
to enduring linkages with intellectuals, with writers from their communities, with
political actors, with working people. We can empower our students to be those future
leaders and artisans.
We live and teach and learn in a global democracy; higher education institutions
are also global in nature, educating students to perform, to create and design in global
economies. Higher education must meet current societal needs by recognizing this,
by redefining and reconsidering what and how they offer a world that is no longer
able to sustain notions of hierarchy by nation, race, or gender. They must reinvent
curriculums and pedagogies, write new assessments and administrative policies, as
it is in their own best interests as they educate young people who will endeavor
to build our futures (Chan, 2016). As a place of study or employment, to what
ends are we deploying the sources to which we have access? Are we bridging the
gap for our students between academy and community? Do we help them see the
value in their own lives and literatures? There are ways to be deeply collaborative
and creative, to think about innovative ways to disseminate research, to change our
classrooms. The canon engages with questions of the politics of the work. We can
choose new texts to use with the same question. Additionally, we must mentor our
students to become scholars and teachers and administrators who will search for
answers outside of the colonial framework they have been given. Peer reviewers,
open access, publishers, agents—people in these spaces must consider the ways in
which gatekeeping ensnares them and keeps them upholding a type of praxis that
has become antiquated and chauvinistic. Finally, we can all stand to be more honest
about our defensiveness about the discipline; our efforts to defend English are as
much about efforts to preserve our livelihoods and this is a major reason we defend
the canon, the academy, and dismiss all the violence these institutions impart. It’s true
that literary knowledge circulates through spaces that ultimately marginalize those
populations. We have to see that. What does it mean for our students to read The Great
Gatsby in a time of change in their lives and countries, and is there something else
that might better serve them? There are many scholars of color who are committed to
thinking about theory making, about how sometimes western university theorizing
cannot understand other domains of knowledge-making. We have to be committed
to recognizing other forms of learning and other spaces. There is so much more than
the canon; this is the ongoing challenge and call to action.
The objective of our work has to be that theory is not something that is simply
produced at the university when we apply imported frameworks. We have to invert
how we understand the direction that theory is produced. We are in service of the
students we teach, and the locals with whom we interact, and we have to push back
against the dominant epistemes that come from a very Hegelian knowledge theme.
We are not looking to expand or pluralize the canon; we are looking to prove that
there are already different canons, different modes of knowledge and knowledge
production. Is our effort to decolonize the literary canon? Or is it to place ourselves

in service of the larger effort of decolonization? There is no decolonizing the literary
canon without a larger world decolonization.
We know that it’s not just about reforming our approaches to the canon; our
institutions need to demand that faculty remake knowledge production. Oman and
indeed the Arab world are locations rich in knowledge production; we can recon-
figure ourselves away from dominant, predominantly western paradigms in education
toward something that makes sense for the future of Oman. Think of a faculty member
who’s been teaching for 30 years; in what way can institutions demand and support
faculty as they speak back to the colonial gaze, to English studies and its deeply
fraught history? Institutions must support colleagues as they move from the center to
a new center. This could be accomplished with course reductions, workshops, sabbat-
icals, and other incentives. In the same way that English departments and colleges
undergo regular institutionalization through annual reports, faculty should both find
support and expectation to decolonize their teaching, mentorship, and research.
Decolonization is not a metaphor for social change (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Decol-
onization is a real process by which indigenous methods are valued and colonial and
imperial hierarchies are disrupted and indeed expelled from the global community
(Smith, 2012). Decolonization does not aspire to take the place of the colonial power,
nor does it endeavor to acquire imperial wealth or recreate the hierarchical systems
that have sustained colonization. Instead, it strives to put an end to the structures of
corruption that generate and perpetuate such corruption and inequity. Decolonization
is affected by the recuperation of indigenous ways of existence (Coulthard, 2014),
positioning connections between people and the land, and imagining global and local
hereafters without concern for the colonizer. This is what we should be striving for
in our classrooms and in our communities.
(In)Conclusion
In the spirit of Baldwin and hooks, I would like to propose that it is ever more
problematic to restrict only to academic exchanges the question about what the
literary canon means and whether or not it is a viable source of learning in the
literary classroom. The global classroom can and must be a space that takes into
account both instructors, power dynamics, foreignness and indigeneity, voice, and
pen. If we ever did consider ourselves or our own professors to be voices of authority,
we must dispense with this notion and think about the ways we can encourage inquiry
and agency on the part of our students. Considering emerging critiques of literature
and literary study (Brennan, 2004; Gandhi, 2019; Nwadike and Onukwo, 2018), it is
time to engage in the process of reconceiving of the various approaches to a critical
literary study—the local, the global—by inviting our students to locate the center in
the classroom, and to create a starting space by which future literary studies in that
class might emanate. Along these lines, a former student of mine, Younis, teaches
literature at a college in Oman. He asks his students to read Omani poetry, then to
178 K. Hemmy
send a letter to the writers in which they articulate their main takeaway ideas and
reply with their own examples from personal experience. When I had the opportunity
to learn about this assignment I was surprised and impressed. Younis recalled that
his world literature class with me had asked him to challenge the canon, to engage
with it, and to find other ways of making meaning from literature. This is an example
of what is possible. Other graduates use hooks’ ideas in a variety of ways, to revise
courses, to solve problems within their community, to look for new approaches to
curriculum development: a former student writes and publishes manga in Arabic,
geared toward young Omani girls. The superhero, Maha, is an Omani version of the
Shoujo heroine archetype, replete with hijab, modest clothing, and Omani Arabic
sayings.
In class today, a student tells us that every Friday she recites the same poem to her
mother. Students ask, and she recites it for us. It is Mahmoud Darwish and begins:
(1983)
We also read it in English.
To My Mother
Dearly I yearn for my mother’s bread,

My mother’s coffee,
Mother’s brushing touch.
Childhood is raised in me,
Day upon day in me.
And I so cherish life
Because if I died
My mother’s tears would shame me.
I ask my students to discuss how they’d translate the rest of the poem. They
come up with:
If I ever return to you,

make me a shawl to protect your eyelashes,
let your hand build a beautiful garden
over my bones, let your footsteps grace me

my burial site as on a holy space.
Bind us together with a lock of your hair
sewn as I grow into godhood with your care
my spirit will grow from your heart’s deep breadth
If I ever return to you, place me in your oven

as fuel to help you cook, or on your roof
as a clothesline which will care for your clothes.
But I am weak without your daily prayers
and the truth is that I can no longer even stand.
I am old—so if I ever return to you

give me back the skies and dreams of childhood
the starts in the sky so that I might find my way home
along with the migrant birds as we seek your awaiting nest
The students work together to build this poem, a collaborative activity that allows
them to value their native language, Arabic, and to bolster their English in ways
that affirm: with cultural heritage, with the solidarity they find in speaking about
Palestine, about Darwish and his nationalism, the country as mother but also the
mother as divine. The most participatory student in the class tells me that Arabic is
so much better than English. You can talk about love in at least nine ways, and one
of them is for mothers, he says. A different student says, and bread. I laugh. I say a
friend of mine has a love poem—an ode—to fried chicken, and Pablo Neruda has an
ode to his socks, “two socks as soft / as rabbits… knitted / with threads of / twilight”
(Neruda, 1993). A quiet student asks if I’ve eaten Omani bread. A mother’s bread
is always better than the other breads, a girl says, wistfully. I know exactly what
she means. “Mother’s bread” is constructed from a specific set of cultural artifacts,
for Darwish, for my student, even for her mother (Eldridge, 2014). We move from
bread to Palestine back to bread again, thinking of the equivalent of a mother’s bread
in other cultures we know. We think of national dishes, social dishes, drinks we
share with company, on Fridays or other days for socializing and family. A student
suggests bringing breads back from their homes and weekend visits, sharing them
with students who don’t get to go home. Workers, foreigners on campus who might
never have had the pleasure of Omani khubz. I turn back to the poem reciter, ask
her why she gives her mother this weekly recitation. “‫ﺑ ذره ﻋﻠﻰ ﯾط ﻠﻊ اﻟ ﺣب‬, she says, an
Omani proverb meaning that the grains grow based on its seeds, meaning that she
is indebted to her mother. The poetry of Darwish is a means of understanding their
Arab, Muslim history, its traumas and its dreams, in the framework of the present-
day; producing an cohesive narrative account, a history that is also a story, which has
imperative consequences on knowledge, connecting existing realities via a “‘reading’
of the past” (Eldridge, 2014).
When oppression and domination are removed from the classroom as mecha-
nisms of control, students will thrive within intellectual spaces created for them, by
180 K. Hemmy
them. Thanks to hooks’ approach to entwining matters of race, gender, culture and
class (1994), her global focus on the entire person and their welfare (2003) encour-
ages a critical pedagogy that becomes transformative. The literature classroom, the
international global with its many uncertainties and limitations remains a location of
possibility. This is learning as the practice of liberation (hooks, 1994). hooks (2003)
contends that it is necessary to sustain hope even when the bleakness of the everyday
might imply the contrary.
Several suggestions are presented here as possibilities toward building a critical
consciousness in the global literature classroom, something that is needed to help
students develop a critical literacy, to move from the classroom to the world in ethical
yet empowering ways. Freire (1970) and hooks (1994) suggest that we scholars and
teachers notice our students, really see them, making practical changes in order
to reduce authoritarianism, welcome inquiry-based learning opportunities, and in
the end, help young people grow into themselves and into their communities. The
simplest—and most-discussed—suggestion has been regarding text choice. Students
need to see themselves and their communities reflected. Better, they need to choose
representations of themselves as a place from which to begin.
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Chapter 12
Orality in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart and Walter Scott’s Waverley
Anna Fancett
Abstract Many people believe cultures develop rich oral histories and then progress
into creating literary traditions. Jack Goody, however, has successfully argued against
this perception of the past, proving that orality and literature thrive in the same
cultures and at the same time. Whereas previous studies of orality and literature have
often focused on the development of narrative from oral tales to written texts, an
awareness of the symbiotic relationship between orality and literature leads to a more
complex investigation of the representation of oral traditions in written texts. This
exploratory study will take Walter Scott and Chinua Achebe as points of comparison.
Both authors radically changed the role of the novel in their respective countries, and
both wrote historical fiction that drew the world’s attention to their nations’ pasts.
In addition, they both wove oral tradition into their novels. However, despite their
similarities, they wrote at different times and in different continents. This paper will
consider the points of comparison between the two novels and identify common
areas about the relationship between literature and orality that can be found in each
work.
Keywords Chinua Achebe · Walter Scott · Comparative literature · Orality · Oral

tradition
Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930, studied English and literature at univer-
sity, and had a career in broadcasting, lecturing, and publishing. Walter Scott was
born in Scotland in 1771, had a broad education, and worked in law. On the surface,
it appears that there is little in common between these two men, separated as they
are by a continent and almost 200 years. However, their work connects them. Both
are hugely successful; they are often attributed with significantly developing literary
tastes. Walter Scott is associated with the historical novel; although other writers
had written novels set in the past before him, Scott developed a winning formula of
following an ordinary person through the changes and dangers caused by large-scale
conflicts. He also changed the reception of the novel in early nineteenth century
A. Fancett (B)
University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom
e-mail: anna.fancett1@abdn.ac.uk; anna.fancett@talk21.com
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_12
184 A. Fancett
Britain; having been decried as a female, unsubstantial genre, the novel form was
masculinized by Scott, leading to it being taken more seriously by critics.1 He also
combined elements of earlier genres, taking elements from types of novel such as
the national tale and the gothic to form what would be adapted by later authors into
the great Victorian novel. Chinua Achebe also combined forms, using elements of
tragedy, for example, merged with Igbo narratives. In addition to being praised for
his excellence, he is also attributed with a change in reader reception; although he
disliked the term, the title of the “father of African literature” has been given to
him, not because he was the first African writer, but because he was one of the first
African writers who became popular across the Anglophone world, and is therefore
a significant figure in the development of the global novel.
There are also significant similarities in their first novels. Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart, first published in 1958, follows a heroic but flawed man, Okonkwo, as he
attempts to build his reputation and wealth despite the disadvantage of being raised
by a lazy and incompetent father. Able to overcome problems such as poverty, bad
harvests, and the consequences of his own mistakes, Okonkwo is ultimately stopped
by the arrival of the colonizers, who destroy the cultural patterns and expectations
of his people. The novel, therefore, shows how the rich and complex Igbo society is
destroyed and simplified by the invaders. Scott’s first novel, Waverley, first published
in 1814, follows a young English man, Waverley, as he travels to the Scottish High-
lands during the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. An easily-swayed youth, Waverley joins
and then leaves the Jacobite cause, allowing his own life to be saved in the process.
The comparison between the novels, however, does not lie in Waverley’s titular hero,
but in his friend, the Scottish Fergus Mac-Ivor. Like Okonkwo, Fergus has many of
the attributes of a hero—he is strong, unswerving, and a leader of others. Also like
Okonkwo, he has a heroic bent toward stubbornness and inflexibility. Although the
Jacobite uprising was not a conflict between two countries, or even, strictly speaking,
the oppression of one people by another, it can be viewed as a conflict between two
cultures, one of which is ultimately defeated and destroyed. The cultural difference
between the Jacobites, represented by Fergus, and the government forces is a major
part of Scott’s novel. Scott’s first readers would most likely have identified with the
culture of the government forces, but the novel turns their sympathies to the Jacobite
Highlanders, whom Scott presents as noble and interesting. Both novels look at how
a powerful people group destroys a rich and interesting culture. Both novels are also
set in the past, but the issue of maintaining group identity after cultural destruc-
tion remains an issue. Although historical fiction, presenting conflicts that were no
longer current, they both deal with issues that were still relevant for the people groups
featured in the novels at the time of publication and which are, perhaps, still relevant
today.
For this chapter, however, the novels’ presentation of the oral is one of the most
important elements of fiction that links these two texts. Achebe and Scott both exploit
the commonly-held belief that the oral is simple and innocent, showing Igbo and
Highland cultures as actively involved in oral traditions and oppressed by cultures
1 For a more detailed discussion of this see: Ferris (1996).

12 Orality in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart … 185
associated with the written word. Oral tales, music, traditions, and beliefs passed
on through the spoken word are important in these novels to the Igbo and High-
land cultures. Their use is not restricted to one function; orality is used to teach,
to praise, and to pass on expectations and beliefs. However, despite exploiting the
expectation that the oral is simple, both Achebe and Scott use it to disguise and
complicate complex issues, and show non-oral media, such as writing and painting,
as simplifying and destructive. The goals of this chapter are similarly both simple
and complex. The primary goal is to compare the similarities of the use of the oral
in Things Fall Apart and Waverley, but there is a secondary goal, which is to begin
to discover whether there are trends in the way the novel uses orality that cross
temporal and geographical space. Therefore, this chapter will begin by considering
the relationship between the oral and the written in general and then look at how
Achebe and Scott use the simplicity of the oral to disguise complex issues, and how
they use the non-oral to reduce the complexity of the heroic figures, Okonkwo and
Fergus. Finally, this chapter will explore what conclusions can be drawn from these
similarities.
It is a commonplace belief that the oral led to the creation of written forms of
narrative; teaching anthologies often begin with transcriptions of oral tales before
moving on to originally written narratives. When discussing literature, we often talk
about texts’ oral sources. Three of the four classic Chinese novels, for example,
took from the oral tradition. Epics, such as The Iliad, are said to have been passed
on orally before they were written down. Early European literature, such as The
Decameron and The Canterbury Tales openly used oral tales. Similarly, a concern is
often expressed by story and song collectors that orality will die out if its parts are not
collected and recorded for prosperity. It is easy, therefore, to see a progression from
oral to written narratives across world history. Despite seeming obvious, however,
this progression is inaccurate. Considerable evidence shows that the written and the
oral often develop side by side. Anthropologist, Jack Goody, has worked with people
groups who do not have written narratives. He found that these societies often do not
have a developed oral tradition. Narratives are told orally, of course, but these are
restricted to histories, which are memorized so that they are accurate records, and
teaching tales used to help children. Folktales, oral forms of epics and drama, often
said to pre-date the written, are not present. Despite common belief, orality “is not so
much a universal feature of the human situation as one that is promoted by literacy
and subsequently by printing.”2 Orality and writing, therefore, do not compete, but
are symbiotic media that support each other.
A Gera Roy has argued that this symbiosis is obvious in African literature. The
belief that the oral develops into the written, he claims, is a mistake made by Western
anthropologists, which does not account for reality, particularly reality in Africa.
Instead of a progression, Roy argues that “The non-literate and literate are, therefore,
not mutually exclusive worlds.”3 Penny Fielding and Caroline Jackson-Houlston, in
their respective monographs, Writing and Orality and Ballads, Songs and Snatches
2 See: Goody (2006).

3 Roy (2015).
186 A. Fancett
have proved that Roy’s claim for not mutually exclusive worlds is borne out in
Scotland as well as in Africa. Their monographs include detailed studies of the
symbiosis between the written and the oral in eighteenth and early nineteenth century
Scotland, a time when people were concerned that the oral tradition was dying out
and therefore collecting and recording as many stories and ballads as they could.4
Literature, of course, can be influenced by the oral tradition. Richard Dorson, quoted
in D. Bamidele, has established three tests to see whether a text can be said to
have been influenced by the oral tradition: there must be biographical evidence that
the author engaged with the oral tradition, internal evidence that shows the author’s
familiarity with folklore, and corroborative evidence that the referenced piece of oral
tradition has a life outside of the text.5 However, influence can be more general than
Dorson accounts for here; the inclusion of oral-like characters, tales, and structures,
demonstrate an indebtedness to the oral tradition even when no direct influence is
apparent. Orality is also influenced by writing. My own study on contemporary
story-collectors, though using a small sample size, shows that storytellers and story-
collectors use written sources to enrich their repertoires, and famous story collections
have changed how stories are told and received orally.6
Orality and writing, therefore, are symbiotic media, with narratives flowing out of
one and into another. It is no surprise, therefore, that Things Fall Apart and Waverley
are textured with references to the oral tradition. Things Fall Apart includes teaching
tales for children, proverbs, customs, and ceremonies. Its inclusion of the oral begins
immediately. The opening paragraph establishes a world in which reputations are
built not only through action but also through word of mouth. In the first sentence,
Okonkwo is said to be “well known,” suggesting that his name and achievements are
widely discussed. The later statements that he “was called” and “the old men agreed”7
build an image in the reader’s mind of people praising and discussing him. The
narrative slides back 20 years in the second paragraph to the famous wrestling match
that Okonkwo won. Orality is pushed even more to the forefront, with references
to drums beating and flutes singing, followed by Okonkwo’s fame spreading like
wildfire. The oral remains integral to the story. Characterization is built through it.
For example, Okonkwo tells stories of blood and battle, but his sensitive son prefers
the folktales of his mother. Ikemefuna’s foreignness is highlighted by the stories that
he tells which “were told with a new freshness and the local flavor of a different
clan,”8 and his innocence is portrayed through the song that he sings to himself on
the way to his execution. Ekwefi’s concern about her daughter is shown through
her use of proverbs and sayings, reflecting her anxiety about her daughter’s possible
status as an ogbanje. Throughout the novel, much of the richness of the description
comes from the use of the oral tradition; as Bamidele says, through the use of orality
4 See: Fielding (1996); Jackson-Houlston (1999).

5 Bamidele (2015).
6 See: Fancett (2018).
7 Achebe (2001).
8 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 26.
“drawn from the author’s cultural landscape […] one can, at once, feel and see the
curves and contours of the Igbo cultural map.”9
The oral tradition is an important part of Highland culture in Waverley, simi-
larly giving the novel depth and texture. The singer, Mac-Murrough, incorporates
Waverley’s name into a Gaelic song used to rouse the people to fight, and when he
asks for an interpretation, Waverley is exposed to Flora Mac-Ivor’s deliberate manip-
ulation of the oral tradition to seduce him to her cause. Later, Fergus Mac-Ivor has
an apparition and uses the oral tradition to accurately interpret it as a sign that he will
soon die. The oral outwith the oral tradition is also important in Waverley; reputation,
particularly, is spread through the words of others and can change the lives of those
discussed. By saying that Waverley has joined the Jacobite cause, those who know
him by reputation pre-empt and cause his change of allegiance.
Both authors also use the oral to establish a sense of place. Achebe openly wanted
to challenge the representation of the Igbo people in colonial texts such as A Heart
of Darkness.10 Aware that his readership would be global, he used his novels to
show the richness and sophistication of Igbo culture. The variety of the oral helped
establish this, breaking down the differences between reader and character. Scott
also wrote about a people group that would have been unfamiliar to most of his
readers—mid-eighteenth-century Highlanders. Highlanders were already a minority
people, mysterious to lowland Scots and the English, but the Act of Proscription
and Highland clearances meant that there were even fewer Highlanders during the
time when Scott was writing. Like Achebe, Scott uses the oral to establish a sense of
space, interweaving traditional stories with the landscape, but unlike Achebe, Scott
uses the oral tradition to show the differences between his characters and readers,
not to break these differences down.
Earlier in this chapter, we discovered that the oral is not a simplistic precursor to
written literature, and instead, that orality and writing have a symbiotic relationship.
Although using the oral in complex ways, both Achebe and Scott play with the idea of
the simplicity and naivete of the oral to disguise complexity. Much work has already
been done on the specific use of the oral in Things Fall Apart, so this chapter will not
dwell too long on this topic. Bamidele, quoting Ohaeto, argues that “proverbs serve
as keys to an understanding of his novels because he uses them not merely to add
local color but to sound and reiterate themes, to sharpen characterization, to clarify,
and to focus on the values of the society he is portraying.”11 The same can be said
of other forms of orality. A good example of this is the tale of the snake-lizard and
his mother, told in full by Ekwefi and Ezinma:
“Yes,” said Ezinma, “that was why the snake-lizard killed his mother.”
“Very true,” said Ekwefi.
“He gave his mother seven baskets of vegetables to cook and in the end there were only
three. And so he killed her,” said Ezinma.
“That is not the end of the story.”
9 Bamidele, Oral Dynamics, 57.

10 See Achebe’s comments on colonial literature: Achebe (1997).
188 A. Fancett
“Oho,” said Ezinma, “I remember now. He brought another seven baskets and cooked
them himself. And there were again only three. So he killed himself too.”12
There are a number of different levels to this exchange. On the surface level,
this is a re-telling of a simple and funny folktale. The story is told in full so that
the reader, who might be unfamiliar with it, can understand and enjoy it. The story
fits in with the idea that the oral tradition is simpler than the written one. There
is no complexity to the story; the listener has to suspend disbelief to accept that
snake-lizards can communicate, cook, and reason like humans; and the conclusion
is ridiculous. However, the story’s role in the novel is anything but simple. It shows
the caring relationship between Ezinma and her mother; not only is Ekwefi testing
her daughter’s knowledge of the story so that it is accurately passed down through
the oral tradition, but she is also using it as a tool to teach her daughter that she needs
to cook more green vegetables than she thinks she will need. On a more complex
level, the story reminds the reader about the fraught relationship Ekwefi has with her
children; at this point in the story, Okonkwo and the medicine man are digging for
Ezinma’s iyi-uwa, in order to break her connection with the world of ogbanje and
therefore tether her to life. They are doing this because Ekwefi had lost nine children
in infancy, and had sunk into bitterness and “listless resignation.”13 As the snake-
lizard took his mother’s life, her children killed Ekwefi’s love for life by dying. The
position of the story in the middle of the search for Ezinma’s iyi-uwa subtly suggests
that Ekwefi would die if her daughter did. Finally, the snake-lizard’s temperament
reflects Okonkwo’s; acting out of anger without thinking through the consequences
is his fatal flaw.
Scott also uses the apparent simplicity of the oral to cover complexity. Waverley
is seduced to the Jacobite cause for a number of reasons. Although some of these
reasons are out of his control (letters are stolen leading to his commanding officer
believing that he had deserted before he had), some of them are in his control. As
a youth, Waverley’s studies were not well directed, meaning that he was able to
fill his mind with tales of chivalry and adventure, taking from romances he read
without limit. His Romantic preconceptions are deliberately manipulated by Flora
Mac-Ivor, sister of Fergus, who wants to win Waverley to the Jacobite cause. After
hearing a song in Gaelic, a language that he does not understand, that features his
name, Waverley asks for an interpretation, which Fergus says that his sister will
provide. Waverley questions Flora closely and when she cannot successfully deflect
his questions, she gets her attendant to lead him to a waterfall.
The borders of this romantic reservoir corresponded in beauty; but it was beauty of a stern
and commanding cast, as if in the act of expanding into grandeur. Mossy banks of turf were
broken and interrupted by huge fragments of rock, and decorated with trees and shrubs, some
of which had been planted under the direction of Flora, but so cautiously, that they added to
the grace, without diminishing the romantic wildness of the scene.
Here, like one of those lovely forms that decorate the landscapes of Claude, Waverley
found Flora gazing on the water fall. Two paces further back stood Cathleen, holding a small

Scottish harp […]. The sun, now stopping in the west, gave a rich and varied tinge to all the
objects which surrounded Waverley, and seemed to add more than human brilliancy to the
full expressive darkness of Flora’s eye, exalted the richness and purity of her complexion,
and enhanced the dignity and grade of her beautiful form. Edward thought he had never,
even in his wildest dreams imagined a figure of such exquisite and interesting loveliness.
The wild beauty of the retreat, bursting upon him as if by magic, augmented the mingled
feeling of delight and awe with which he approached her, like a fair enchantress of Boiardo
or Ariosto, by whose nod the scenery around him seemed to have been created, an Eden in
the wilderness.14
In this passage, Flora has created a situation that she knows will appeal to and
distract Waverley. She stops his conversation by sending him, with a Gaelic speaker
as an attendant, away from her to a place that has been deliberately chosen to appeal
to Waverley’s romantic disposition. The place itself has been artificially adapted
by her in such a way that it still appears wild. When Waverley arrives, Flora and
her attendant are sitting waiting for him in such a position that is designed to raise
his admiration. Instead of answering his questions when he first asked, or even
traveling to the waterfall together, she stage-manages the scene to exact an emotional
response. When she sings a translation of the song that Waverley had heard, she does
not translate the section that he is keen to hear—the part that includes his name.
Instead of noticing and continuing with his line of questioning, Waverley is awed,
and “The charms of melody and beauty were too strongly impressed in Edward’s
breast to permit his declining an invitation [to stay with Mac-Ivors] so pleasing.”15
As the apparent simplicity of the folktale in Things Fall Apart hides the complexity
of characters and their situations, so too does the apparent wildness of the oral in
Waverley cover the artifice and cunning of those who employ it.
Although both Achebe and Scott use the apparent simplicity of the oral to hide
apparent complexity, they do this for different reasons and in different ways. Achebe
was frustrated about the way in which Africa was presented in colonial, Anglophone
texts. Achebe shows Igbo culture from the inside, not through the eyes of colonizers.
Roy says that:
If we recall the oppositional role of orality in post-colonial resistance, African orature cannot
afford to replicate Western trends. Far from contributing to their novels’ anthropological
flavour or acting as symbolic devices, folk materials revise the anthropological discourse of
the West through which African cultures were inferioritized. They do so by juxtaposing an
alternative idiom–of African orature–with its own unique manner of structuring reality that
might offer a way of ending Africa’s discursive indentureship to the West.16
Achebe rejects showing culture and orality through the lens of an anthropological
gaze that reduces it to one thing or another. Instead of presenting Igbo culture as
one thing—noble or simple or a foil to another culture—Achebe presents it in all
its complexity. Although the novel presents the conflict of cultures brought about
by the arrival of the colonizers, Igbo culture is shown as complete; it does not need
14 Scott (2007). 113–114.

15 Scott, Waverley, 188.
16 Roy, The Folktale, 31.
190 A. Fancett
outsiders to explain or interpret it. Bamidele argues that the reader is invited to judge;
characters such as Okonkwo are not stereotypes—he is neither perfect nor terrible
but a human mix of strengths and weaknesses.17 The oral tradition is part of the
breaking down of othering. Some of that which is shared orally is delightful, some
is problematic, and some is neutral. More importantly, not all characters relate to or
understand the oral tradition in the same way. The narrator is not in the position of
an anthropologist, making blanket statements about a people group because of their
use of the oral tradition. Instead, the narrator shows that it means different things
to different people and can be used as part of a misunderstanding within the Igbo
culture. When Ikemefuna is taken to be killed, he does not understand the situation
and worries that his mother might be dead. He returns to a song from his childhood:
Eze elina, elina!
Sala
Eze ilikwa ya
Ikwaba akwa oligholi
Ebe Danda nechi eze
Ebe Uzuzu nete egwu
Sala
He sang it in his mind, and walked to its beat. If the song ended on his right foot, his mother
was alive. If it ended on his left, she was dead. No, not dead, but ill. It ended on the right.
She was alive and well. He sang the song again, and it ended on the left. But the second time
did not count. The first voice gets to Chukwo, or God’s house. That was a favourite saying
among children.18
Ikemefuna uses the oral tradition here to calm himself and by doing so he reverts
back to his younger childhood, singing to himself a song that he had sung as a small
boy, and following the traditions and beliefs of young childhood. This brings home
his innocence, but it also shows how the oral tradition does not clarify the situation for
Ikemefuna. The reader walks alongside Ikemefuna, not studying him as an outsider,
but sympathizing with him.
Although Scott also uses the apparent simplicity of the oral to cover great
complexity, he is happy to “other” the Highland culture, making the Highlanders
Romantic, exotic figures who are difficult for his nineteenth century readers to
understand. He does this through focalization and language. The novel is focalized
through Waverley, an outsider, in key Highland scenes, and his ignorance and naivety
create a barrier between the reader and the action. At the same time, the use of the
Gaelic language, which is incomprehensible to Waverley and most of Scott’s read-
ership, adds further distance between the reader and the Highlanders. This chapter
has already discussed the non-translation of Mac-Murrough’s song, but the actual
song itself is a good example of how the oral is used to distance the readers from the
characters and action of the novel. When Fergus calls for the singer:

Mac-Murrough, the family bhairdh, an aged man, immediately took the hint, and began to
chaunt, with low and rapid utterance, a profusion of Celtic verses, which were received by
the audience with all the applause of enthusiasm. As he advanced in his declamation, his
ardour seemed to increase. He had at first spoken with his eyes fixed on the ground; he now
cast them around as if beseeching, and anon as if commanding attention, and his tones rose
into wild and impassioned notes, accompanied with appropriate gesture.19
Waverley can interpret neither Mac-Murrough’s language nor his actions. He

guesses the general feeling of the song based on Mac-Murrough’s tone of voice, but
the meaning is lost. The reader shares Waverley’s perspective. No interpretation is
given so that the meaning of the song is unknown. As previously discussed, even
Flora’s later translation does not seem to match what is sung. Mac-Murrough’s actions
are also not explained to the reader. Does he begin by looking at the ground for
dramatic effect, or does this gesture have any other significance in Highland culture?
Although the novel shows the oral being used complexly, it does not use the oral to
draw the readers into the inside of Highland culture, which is a contrast to how the
oral is used in Things Fall Apart.
Okonkwo and Fergus are both connected to orality. Okonkwo is a member of an
oral culture, and his involvement in it is specific to his personality. He prefers violent
stories and proverbs. Fergus, his sister, and their culture are shown in contrast to
the written world of Waverley. However, as has been demonstrated, the apparent
simplicity of the orality that Okonkwo and Fergus are involved in covers a great deal
of complexity. Both characters, however, are silenced and dismissed by the non-oral.
In Things Fall Apart, the complexity of nobility of Okonkwo’s character is dismissed
by the future written words of the colonizer:
As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some
new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would
make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a
whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include,
and one must be firm in cutting out the details. He had already chosen the title of the book,
after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.20
The colonizer does not understand Okonkwo or his culture. Much of the power
of the novel’s tragedy lies in this final statement; despite all that he had overcome,
Okonkwo’s life and death do not count in the annals of his oppressors. The beliefs,
traditions, and stories around which Okonkwo had built his life are lost and these
dismissive written words are left. The disconnect between these words and the rich-
ness of Okonkwo’s life is designed to anger the reader and, if they are familiar with
colonial texts like A Heart of Darkness, to change their perspective. This passage
shows that it is the written text that simplifies the story and misunderstands the
complexities and nuances within, not the oral tale.
In Waverley, a similar result is achieved by a painting. Whereas Waverley wavered
between different causes, ultimately escaping the fate of his sometime Jacobite

20 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 151–2.
192 A. Fancett
compatriots, Fergus was loyal to his cause. After his death, Waverley marries the
Scottish (lowland) Rose Bradwardine, and a painting in hung in their house:
It was a large and spirited painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their
Highland dress, the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were
descending in the background. It was taken from a spirited sketch, drawn while they were
in Edinburgh by a young man of high genius, and had been painted on a full-length scale
by an eminent London artist. Raeburn himself (whose ‘Highland Chiefs’ do all but walk out
of the canvas) could not have done more justice to the subject; and the ardent, fiery, and
impetuous character of the unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich was finely contrasted with
the contemplative, fanciful, and enthusiastic expression of his happier friend. Beside this
painting hung the arms which Waverley had borne in the unfortunate civil war. The whole
piece was generally admired.21
Like Okonkwo’s, Fergus’s way of living, all but destroyed by the time of writing,
is replaced by a sanitized, romanticized, and simplified version. No longer a complex
character who combines urbane sophistication with fierce loyalty, Fergus has become
the mere image of a Romanticised Highlander. The event depicted is not true to life;
it implies that Waverley and Fergus led the tribe but, in fact, Waverley had always
been an outsider and a reluctant participant (in his only battle, his only act was to
rescue an opponent soldier). The sketch was drawn in Edinburgh, far away from
Highland society, and then painted in London, even further away. The written text
also adds to the erasure of Fergus’s complexity. Not only did Waverley start rewriting
history in his written correspondence to Rose, but in this passage the interjection of
the narrator’s voice in reference to the work of Raeburn, brings the reader back to
the fact that they are reading a fictional novel in 1814 (or beyond).
What has this chapter discovered? First of all, despite the temporal and geograph-
ical space between Achebe and Scott, these two authors both use orality in similar
ways. They play with the idea that the oral is simple and naïve, and use it to cover the
complexity of their characters and the societies that they are from. Whereas Achebe
makes his reader an insider in Igbo culture, Scott others the Highlanders, using the
gap between reader and character to highlight the demise of the Highland culture.
Both Achebe and Scott show non-oral media, especially writing, as ways to suppress
and simplify the oral, but do so in such a way as to make their reader angry, resisting
the forceful authority of the non-oral, thus once again demonstrating the autonomy
and complexity of the oral. With a sample size of two novels, it is impossible to make
any definite claims about the relationship between orality and writing in general, but
it worth investigating whether other written texts consciously play with the idea of
oral simplicity while presenting its complexity and depth. As anthropologists and
scholars like Jack Goody have demonstrated that the oral and the written develop
alongside each other, it is not impossible that this would be the case.

References
Achebe, C. (1997). Reprinted Edition. An image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s heart of darkness.
In B. Moore-Gilbert (Eds.), Postcolonial criticism. Gareth Stanton and Willy Maley. https://doi.
org/10.4324/9781315843452.
Achebe, C. (2001). Things fall apart (Penguin). Penguin.
Bamidele, D. (2015). The Folktale in Achebe’s Fictions. In C. Smith & C. Ce (Eds.), Oral tradition
in African literature (pp. 51–68). Handel Books.
Fancett, A. (2018). The immortal story: Story-collecting in China and the UK. In W. Gefei (Eds.),
Comparative literature and cross-cultural study: A multiculturalist perspective (pp. 183–201).
Nanjing: Nanjing University Press.
Ferris, I. (1996). The achievement of literary authority: Gender, history, and the waverley novels.
Cornell University Press.
Fielding, P. (1996). Writing and orality: Nationality, culture, and nineteenth century Scottish fiction.
Claredon Press.
Goody, J. (2006). From oral to written: An anthropological breakthrough in storytelling. In F. Moretti
(Ed.), The Novel (Vol. 1, pp. 3–37). Princeton University Press.
Jackson-Houlston, C. M. (1999). Ballads, songs and snatches: The appropriation of folk song and
popular culture in British 19th-Century Realist Prose. Routledge.
Roy, A. G. (2015). The Folktale in Achebe’s Fictions. In C. Smith & C. Ce (Eds.), Oral tradition
in African literature (pp. 3–50). Handel Books.
Scott, W. (2007). Edinburgh Edition. P. D. Garside (Eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Chapter 13
Rejecting the (Step)Mother Tongue:
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translingual Identity
Mary Wardle
Abstract Unlike many writers who adopt the language of the country to which they
emigrate or with which they have ties dictated by colonialism, politics, or economics,
the choice of Jhumpa Lahiri—the Pulitzer-prize-winning North American writer of
Bengali heritage—to express herself creatively in Italian is apparently unmotivated.
In altre parole (2015, trans. In Other Words) narrates her relationship with Italian,
from language lessons in America to her journeys to Italy and her ultimate decision
to “abandon” English and write in this new language that somehow liberates her.
This chapter examines Lahiri’s work at the intersection between language, culture,
and translation raising questions of personal identity and translingualism. The focus
will be on tracing Lahiri’s representations of cultural hybridity throughout her work,
in subsequent translations, and in the various paratextual elements surrounding the
texts.
Keywords Translingualism · Cultural hybridity · Jhumpa Lahiri · Translation ·

Paratexts
If we are to believe Gayatri Spivak when she states that “[i]n my view, language
may be one of many elements that allow us to make sense of things, of ourselves,
[and] making sense of ourselves is what produces identity” (2012: 312), it would
seem inevitable that the question of identity becomes further complicated when more
than one language is at stake. Recent years have witnessed an increase in academic
interest in this specific area of study and “multilingual identity and subjectivity,
psyche and emotionality are now explored across disciplines using non-traditional
research methods: via autobiography, literary text, narrative, and arts” (Lvovich &
Kellman, 2015: 3). The emerging field of translingual literature—texts written by
authors in more than one language or in a language other than their native tongue—
also has much to contribute to the debate, since, for many translingual writers, their
biographies, and literary production unfold at the intersection of different territories,
cultures, and languages. The focus of this paper will be the work of Jhumpa Lahiri,
M. Wardle (B)
Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
e-mail: mary.wardle@uniroma1.it
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_13
196 M. Wardle
the London-born, American writer of Bengali heritage, her linguistic identity first
as an author in English, and also subsequently as a translated author, but especially
as a writer who then decides to “abandon” English and begin writing in Italian, a
language she has learnt in adulthood and with which she shares no previous ties.
If we understand translation in its broadest sense, as a crossing of thresholds, then
much of Lahiri’s production can be viewed as occupying a liminal space, as she
“translates herself” as it were, as all translingual writers do to some extent: this paper
will investigate how her own cultural identity informs her writing, how her literary
identity emerges through her texts, including their translations by others.
In Bengali culture, children are traditionally assigned a “good” name for formal
identification and interaction with the outside world while being called by a “pet”
name within the family and friendship circle. “Jhumpa” Lahiri was, in fact, officially
named Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri when she was born in 1967 in London, where her
family had moved from West Bengal in India, and from where, when she was just
two, they then moved to Kingston, Rhode Island. Despite being born and brought
up in Anglophone countries, however, Lahiri (2016) did not speak English until she
first went to school at the age of four (2016: 146). Up until this point, the only
language she heard and spoke was Bengali used within the home. Lahiri recalls how
“my parents wanted me to speak only Bengali with them and all their friends. If I
spoke English at home they scolded me” and, most tellingly, as far as her personal
identity was concerned, “[t]he part of me that spoke English, that went to school,
that read and wrote, was another person” (149). On beginning school in America,
Lahiri describes her first impact with English as “traumatic”, “because I had to
express myself in a language that I didn’t speak, that I barely knew, that seemed
foreign to me.” Her perception of herself as an outsider, with little agency over her
situation, was confirmed when her teachers arbitrarily made the decision to do away
with her “complicated” formal name and simply address her as Jhumpa, to them
a more straightforward moniker. We should however bear in mind Kate Briggs’
observation: “How we say each other’s names out loud is one of the ways in which
we position ourselves, publicly, in relation to each other, to other people, to languages,
to culture, to knowledge, and to power” (2018: 176). The renaming to which Lahiri
was subjected, and the attending reframing of her identity, was to leave its mark also
on her writing: in 2003, she publishes her first novel, The Namesake, the story of
Gogol, an Indian child who grows up without an official name, resulting in a lifelong
compulsion to define his identity. And, in the accounts of many individuals who live
across languages and cultures, being assigned a new name emerges as a trope for
lost identity. Eva Hoffman, for example, whose family emigrated from Poland in
1959 finds that her new Canadian teachers adapt her name from its original spelling
Ewa to Eva, and her sister’s name from Alina to Elaine. Describing this “careless
baptism”, Hoffman writes:
The twist to our names takes them a tiny distance from us. Our Polish names didn’t refer to
us; they were as surely us as our eyes and hands. These new appellations […] are not us. […]
We walk to our seats, into a roomful of unknown faces, with names that make us strangers
to ourselves (1991: 105).
13 Rejecting the (Step)Mother Tongue: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translingual Identity 197
After the initial traumatic impact of the language of her new home, therefore,
Lahiri learns to read and write in English and, 2 years later, at around the age of
six, “Bengali took a step backward… From then on, my mother tongue was no
longer capable, by itself, of rearing me. In a certain sense it died. English arrived, a
stepmother” (2016: 147). In describing English as her stepmother tongue, Lahiri is
following in the tradition outlined by John Skinner in his discussion of Anglophone
postcolonial fiction, when he points out how “in folk-tales from many cultures,
relations between children and stepmothers are almost invariably fraught” (1998: 11),
and Lahiri’s relationship with English was no exception. She frequently describes her
response in emotive terms, symptomatic of the new dysfunctional relation that had
entered her domestic environment with “conflict”, “abandonment”, and “rejection”
as recurring terminology. The confusion caused by apparently conflicting physical
appearance, cultural identity and linguistic expression leads to misunderstandings
and thwarted expectations and becomes a leitmotif of Lahiri’s work. Speaking about
herself, she explains how “no one, anywhere, assumes that I speak the languages that
are part of me” (2016: 143). All her life, “it’s what I’ve struggled with: In India, I’m
told, ‘You look Indian, you speak Bengali, but you’re really American.‘ In America,
I’m told, ‘You sound and act American, but you’re really Indian’” (Minzesheimer,
2003).
On the one hand, when Lahiri expresses herself in English she feels a sense of
separation from her parents, cast out from their protection; the new language, that
they do not speak, causes her to feel she is betraying and rejecting them. On the
other hand, at school, she longs to fit in with her peers: this (necessary) assimilation
process produces a sense of shame. She then becomes ashamed of being ashamed.
These themes emerge clearly in Lahiri’s writing and are never far from the surface:
throughout her work, she addresses the mixed responsibilities and divided loyalties
of belonging to two different cultures. Her narratives often center around questions
of cultural displacement and dislocation: Indian families living in the United States
and North Americans visiting India. There is a tension between the freedom offered
by progressive Western values and the safety of patriarchal Indian traditions, with
Lahiri never allowing one “side” to gain the definitive upper hand. This cultural
and linguistic hybridity around which her early production revolves can be placed
against theories of postcolonial studies and Homi Bhabha’s concept of a third space,
the emergence of new cultural forms from multiculturalism and how the colonial
experiences of the past color the present cultural landscape:
Immigrants, refugees or minorities who live in the midst of the metropolitan centers of
the North and South represent the most tangible and proximate presence of the global or
transnational world as it exists within ‘national’ societies. When we talk of ever-expanding
boundaries and territories of the global world, we must not fail to see how our own intimate,
indigenous landscapes should be remapped to include those who are its new citizens; or
those whose citizenly presence has been annihilated or marginalized (1994: xxii).
In her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, there are constant
references to the ambiguity surrounding cultural background: in the title story, we
are introduced to an American couple, Mina and Raj Das, of Bengali heritage—like
Lahiri herself—who are in India with their three children, to visit the grandparents.
198 M. Wardle
The fact that they do not “fit in” is signaled in a number of ways. The first is their
appearance: with clear echoes of Lahiri’s own experience, we are told that “[t]he
family looked Indian but dressed as foreigners did” (1999: 43–44). The status of the
American couple as “other” is also underlined by the fact that they hire a guide, Mr.
Kapasi to drive them and take them to the sights—”local” guides, typically, show
“outsiders” around, introduce, explain and act as intermediaries. Mr. Kapasi is also,
in some way, our guide, as readers: while the story is narrated in the third person, we
experience the events from his point of view, inviting us, therefore, to observe the
family as he does, as outsiders.
Perhaps the most intriguing device Lahiri deploys to set Mr. and Mrs. Das apart,
however, is her use of language: the couple speaks in colloquial Standard Amer-
ican English, while their Indian guide adopts more formal Standard Indian English.
Linguistic variation therefore becomes a subtle representation of cultural distance.
The following short exchange, opening with an observation from Mrs. Das, illustrates
the point:
“Those monkeys give me the creeps.”
“But they’re harmless,” Mr. Das said. He turned to Mr. Kapasi. “Aren’t they?”
“They are more hungry than dangerous,” Mr. Kapasi said. “Do not provoke them with food,
and they will not bother you.” (61).
We can notice how the American couple’s slang (give me the creeps) and their
use of contractions (they’re harmless, aren’t they?) contrasts with Mr. Kapasi’s more
formal English. Where we might expect the contractions typically associated with
spoken language (they’re more hungry, don’t provoke them, they won’t bother you),
his linguistic formality denotes cultural distance and can even be read as introducing
notions of social inequality: the couple express themselves in a relaxed manner, with
linguistic ease, while their guide appears to be minding “how he speaks”, perhaps
fearing judgement from the Americans who are effectively his employers.
Another example:
“Who’s that?” Mrs. Das asked.
“He is the Astachala-Surya,” Mr. Kapasi said. “The setting sun.”
“So in a couple of hours the sun will set right here?”
“That is correct.”
“Neat.”
Mr. Kapasi was not certain exactly what the word suggested, but he had a feeling it was a
favorable response. (59).
Again, we have the use of contractions, not only the contrast between formal and
informal but also the contrast between the fact that although Mr. Kapasi is the bearer
of knowledge, translating the Sanskrit Astachala-Surya into English, explaining its
relevance, he is confused by Mrs. Das’ casual use of “neat”. While in both cases,
it is the couple who initiates the exchanges and checks their understanding of what
they are being told (the tag Aren’t they? in the first conversation and So the sun will
set here? in the second), Mr. Kapasi is left unsure of himself, wondering whether his
interpretation of the exchange is the correct one. The imbalance is once again relayed
linguistically. As Lynn Blin points out: “From the colloquial Standard English of the
Das couple, which Mr. Kapasi does not fully understand, to the stilted Standard
Indian English of Mr. Kapasi, Lahiri’s short story illustrates the difficult task of
translating English into English” (2014:172). Lahiri’s use of language here can be
seen as shining a light on the intricacies of intralingual translation, to borrow Roman
Jakobson’s terminology, highlighting the degree of divergence that can exist between
different formulations of the same content within the same language, albeit different
varieties. Lahiri manages to convey this highly complex and fraught intersection of
social and cultural identities with great skill.
As readers also, we each bring our own individual experience and world knowl-
edge to bear on our reception of a text, and in my case, for example, as a native
speaker of British English, Lahiri’s use of American English immediately marks
the discourse. Remaining within the confines of the same story, as well as “neat”,
there are many other features typical of American English. They fall under the general
categories of spelling: gray, whiskey, brightly colored—where a British reader would
expect “grey”, “whisky”, and “coloured”; vocabulary: rest room, sneakers, hood of
the car, gearshift, windshield, to holler, Mommy—British equivalents might include
“bathroom/toilets”, “trainers”, “bonnet”, “gear stick”, “windscreen”, “to scream”,
“Mum(my)”; verbal constructions: I teach middle school, Quit complaining, The
children had gotten up from the table—more usual in the UK would be “I teach at
school”, “stop complaining”, “…had got up”. There are also a number of cultural
references to the American educational system (college and high school) as well as
one of the Das children asking his father “Daddy, why is the driver sitting on the
wrong side in this car?”1 which, of course, would not be a question that a British child
would ask, since cars in India and the United Kingdom are driven on the same side of
the road. These Americanisms appear in the narrative as well as in the speech of the
American family and, as such, they increase the element of hybridity: as mentioned
earlier, the narrative point of view is that of Mr. Kapasi, an Indian in his homeland,
but the language of the narrative is replete with Americanisms and so can create the
sense of dislocation mentioned earlier, of things not quite fitting for the Anglophone
but non-American reader.
Lahiri, thus, uses a linguistic variation to great effect to represent cultural distance.
But what of these differences when the stories move out of the direct control of the
author and are translated interlinguistically? Following the success of Interpreter of
Maladies and, in particular, after winning the Pulitzer Prize, the collection was trans-
lated into many languages, and a brief analysis of Claudia Tarolo’s Italian translation
(2014) can help trace the repercussions for Lahiri’s representation of cultural identity
through linguistic features. It was Jean-Jacques Lecercle who set out to investigate
what he terms the “remainder”, the “other” present in language, the part that defies
prescriptivism and rules: “I shall dwell in the exceptional and the agrammatical, in
the irrelevant and the excluded aspects of language, in the ambiguities and impurities
of natural idioms” (1990: 52). In turn, Lawrence Venuti advocates that translations
1 Emphasis added.
200 M. Wardle
should maintain this otherness, marking the text as foreign, foregrounding its status
as a translation, without attempting to assimilate the text to target culture norms:
“Good translation is minoritizing: it releases the remainder by cultivating a hetero-
geneous discourse, opening up the standard dialect and the literary canons to what
is foreign to themselves, to the substandard and the marginal” (1998: 11).
Although Lahiri’s stories are being translated, therefore, from English to Italian,
there is a certain resonance with the position described by Gayatri Spivak on the
treatment of Bengali texts when translated into English. In her opinion, “the ‘poli-
tics of translation’ currently gives prominence to English and the other ‘hegemonic’
languages of the ex-colonizers. Translations into these languages from Bengali too
often fail to translate the difference of the Bengali view because the translator,
although with good intentions, over-assimilates it to make it accessible to the western
readers” (Munday, 2016: 208). This Eurocentric view of much current translation
strategy is apparent, in the Italian version, in the elision of some of the specifically
Indian references in Lahiri’s English text. Indeed, a close reading of translations, as
well as telling us about the translation itself, can also reveal features of the source
text.
It is almost inevitable that some linguistic features be “lost in translation“, as
the hackneyed phrase states. Italian, of course, cannot create the same distinction
between Standard American and Standard Indian English as the source text. The
translator could, however, mark the text in a number of ways, adopting different
registers to signal the disparity in formality, adding “he said in his Indian accent”,
“they said using American slang”, and so forth. The translation in fact does none
of these things and uses standard Italian throughout, for all dialogues and narration.
The exchange about the monkeys becomes:
“Queste scimmie mi danno sui nervi.”
“Ma non fanno niente” obiettò il signor Das. “Non è vero?”
“Sono più affamate che pericolose” rispose il signor Das. “Se non le provocate con il cibo
non vi daranno fastidio” (77).
There is no distinction in the discourse of the three participants and Mr. Das
has been Italianized into signor Das. The reporting verbs have also been adapted
from “said” that appeared twice in this short passage to “obiettò/objected” and
“rispose/answered”, typical of standard Italian narrative discourse, that shuns the
simple, more direct choices often found in English. This last point becomes particu-
larly pertinent in the case of Lahiri, praised in most reviews for the apparent simplicity
of her prose—constant comparisons are made with Carver and Hemingway—a
literary style familiar to and appreciated by many Anglophone readers. When carried
over into the translation, any resulting “stripped back” style would not be typical of
Italian prose, and, as seen, there are small but consistent changes made to “elevate”
the writing. Just as the remainder is far less apparent from a linguistic point of view
to the Italian reader of this particular translation, there is a tendency to extend the
domesticating strategy to the treatment of cultural references in the stories. The
mustard oil, for example, typical of Northern and Eastern India, and something unfa-
miliar to most Americans—Lahiri’s original audience—and Italians, that lingers on
Mina’s lips as she eats puffed rice, in Italian becomes more simply “mustard”:
“She turned to him and glared, mustard oil thick on her frosty pink lips” (66).
“Si voltò verso di lui sgranando gli occhi, con le labbra rosa sporche di senape”2 (81).
A perhaps more striking example of how domestic values become inscribed in

the target text can be seen in the following example: “Mrs. Das listened attentively,
stroking her hair with a small plastic brush that resembled a small bed of nails” (54).
While we do not know what effect Lahiri was seeking to create with this description,
the reader might formulate a mental association between the plastic of the hairbrush
with its artificiality and disposable nature and contrast it with the traditional, enduring
image of the bed of nails; the lightweight, mobile, plastic brush might be seen as
linked to America, the heavy, stable, bed of nails to India; a coming together of two
opposites, where the repeated use of the adjective “small” and the simile suggest that
there are commonalities. These are all possible interpretations that Lahiri’s English
language reader can project onto the text. For the Italian reader, on the other hand,
these options have been removed by the choice of the translator to substitute the bed
of nails with a crown of thorns, a potent image within a culture strongly influenced by
the Catholic tradition: “La signora Das ascoltava attentamente, pettinandosi i capelli
con una spazzolina di plastica che sembrava una corona di spine”3 (69).
The present discussion should not be read as a criticism of the Italian translation:
to varying degrees, these are just things that happen in translation, especially in a
linguistically and culturally complex text such as this. The position adopted is very
much a descriptive one and, hopefully, highlights the intricacy of Lahiri’s text and
the consequent challenges faced by any potential translator. Indeed, the complexity
of Lahiri’s (representation of) cultural identity is not limited to the text itself: just
as certain characteristics are attributed to her and her characters based solely on
physical appearance, so she frequently feels her literary production is pigeon-holed
by its paratextual elements and the book covers in particular. The cover illustrations
are a strong indication of the anticipated appeal of the books, with many featuring
exotic or exoticizing scripts, colors, and images. Both the English-language editions
and the various foreign-language translations of her work present a multitude of
tropes typically associated with “Indianness”, regardless of whether they appear in
the narrative or not, including flower garlands, statues of Ganesh, women in saris
and bowls of spices (Wardle forthcoming).
It is therefore no coincidence that Lahiri returns on a number of occasions to
discussions of some of the elements surrounding her texts—book covers, illustra-
tions, dust jackets—indeed she has published an essay on the subject, focusing once
again on the question of (perceived) identity. She reiterates the fact that “all my life I
have been in conflict between two different identities, both imposed. No matter how
I try to free myself from this conflict, I find myself, as a writer, caught in the same
2 Emphasis added.
3 Emphasis added.
202 M. Wardle
trap” (2017: 51). This conflict is then projected onto the cover design through which
she is vicariously presented to the reader of her books:
For some publishing houses, my name and my photograph are enough to quickly commission
a cover that teems with stereotyped references to India: elephants, exotic flowers, henna-
painted hands, the Ganges, religious and spiritual symbols. No one considers that the greater
part of my stories are set in the United States, and therefore pretty far from the Ganges (50).
Through her own admission, Lahiri’s sensibility in this domain runs deep: “For
me […] a wrong jacket is not just an aesthetic issue, because it retriggers a series of
anxieties felt ever since I was a child. Who am I? How am I seen, dressed, perceived,
read? I write not only to avoid the question, but also to seek the answer” (51).
Following the success of Interpreter of Maladies and her following three works—
The Namesake (2003), Unaccustomed Earth (2008), The Lowland (2013)—this
constant quest for an answer to her questions of identity was to take Lahiri’s creative
production in an entirely unexpected direction: the origins of her new trajectory can
be traced back to 1994 before her literary career had taken off, and a 1-week trip
to Florence in Italy to study the interrelation between architecture and literature as
part of her PhD research in Renaissance Studies at Boston University. More than the
buildings, the art, or even the people, however, the strongest impact on her is that
made by the Italian language. Even though she does not understand what is being
said, she reacts to the sounds and rhythm of what she hears: “It seems like a language
with which I have to have a relationship. It’s like a person met one day by chance,
with whom I immediately feel a connection […] It stirs an indiscreet, absurd longing.
An exquisite tension. Love at first sight” (2016: 15).
From this moment on, she is overcome by a compulsion to learn the language even
though she does not live in the country where it is spoken or even know any Italians.
There is no obvious practical purpose. On returning to the United States, therefore,
she sets about learning the language, “in exile, in a state of separation” (19), initially
with the help of a Teach Yourself Italian textbook, followed by elementary classes
at University and later graduating to private tuition. In the meantime, as her writing
career provides her with increasing levels of success, over the years, she makes several
further trips to Italy, to promote her books and speak at literary festivals on the one
hand but also to practice her fledgling knowledge of Italian on the other. All this
until 2010, when she comes to the remarkable decision that the only way to advance
her linguistic journey is to move to Italy, taking her husband and two children with
her, and immerse herself in the language and culture. Six months before she is due to
leave, she begins to wean herself off English, as it were, by taking the singular step
of no longer reading anything in English and concentrating solely on Italian books.
Once the family arrives in Rome, she goes even further and makes the most drastic
decision of all whereby, from now on, she will no longer write in English, but will
express herself creatively uniquely in Italian.
For many language learners, there is a period of curiosity and, at times, excitement,
toward the newly discovered code, as though the mysterious words will yield new
truths. Lahiri’s experience appears to confirm many of the phases experienced in
foreign-language acquisition contexts, outlined by Claire Kramsch. For newcomers

to a language,
words are not yet moored to their conventional meanings. They easily lend themselves to
unconventional associations based on their shape, their music, and their similitude to other
words. For native speakers, these associations might sound strange or untoward, but for
non-native speakers, who imbue the new language with all the physical properties of their
own bodies, they have personal and emotional meaning (2009: 30).
Lahiri’s linguistic euphoria is so complete that she finds joy even in the challenges
posed by Italian: “The obstacles stimulate me. Every new construction seems a
marvel. Every unknown word a jewel” (37). And just as “the acquisition of a foreign
language can reveal unexpected meanings, alternative truths that broaden the scope
of the sayable and the imaginable” (15), Lahiri finds herself, on discovering the word
claustrale (cloistered) for example, “suddenly enthralled, bewitched by this word. I
want to know it immediately […] I’m convinced that finding out what this word means
could change my life” (43). This last quote, along with several others throughout
this article, is drawn from Lahiri’s 2015 memoir In altre parole, an account of her
relationship with the Italian language, written in Italian, and published 5 years after
her initial decision to move to Italy. The commitment to her “new” tongue becomes
so all-encompassing that Lahiri chooses not to translate herself (back) into English
for the American edition of the book, In Other Words (2016), a task subsequently
carried out by Ann Goldstein. Lahiri notes: “I was reluctant to move back and forth
between the two. My impulse at the time was to protect my Italian. Returning to
English was disorienting, frustrating, also discouraging. It made me acutely aware
of how limited my Italian was compared with my English” (xiii).
Since 2015, Lahiri’s production of fiction has therefore been in Italian: alongside
the memoir discussed above and her essay on book covers, she has also published her
first novel in Italian, Dove mi trovo (2018). Her now more stable relationship with
Italian has allowed her to return to writing in English for the translation of two short
novels by Italian author Domenico Starnone and six stories in the anthology of Italian
short stories she has edited for Penguin. For the first time, in 2021, she translated
her own work, producing the English translation of her 2018 novel, Whereabouts.
Although she has now returned to live in the United States, the bond with Italian
remains. From being a bilingual subject, who wrote in English, she has become
a translingual or exophonic writer—adopting a language that is not her own. Of
such writers, the overwhelming majority choose this “other” language for reasons
of circumstance, most frequently dictated to them by constriction, persecution, and
oppression. Economic immigrants, political refugees, and religious exiles all find
themselves in new adoptive homelands and new adoptive languages. The literature
on the subject is extensive and cannot be addressed in any detail here but the questions
raised by Johann Heilbron (1999) on the one hand and Pascale Casanova (2004) on
the other can serve well to illustrate the anomaly represented by Lahiri’s decision.
One of the recurring phenomena of postcolonial fiction is the choice of writers
from the so-called periphery to adopt the language of their former colonial masters
so as to reach a wider audience and engage with readers who would otherwise be
204 M. Wardle
unlikely to come across their production. Even outside once-colonized territories,

this discourse is in line with Heilbron’s view of the contemporary international
publishing system as “a hierarchical structure, with central, semi-peripheral and
peripheral languages” (433), dictating the cultural flow, often through translation,
across different parts of the world. If a writer wants to be read by as large an audience
as possible, and be commercially successful, the most obvious route is to publish
in a central language. Similarly, Casanova comments on writers such as Conrad,
Nabokov, and Kundera,
whose comings and goings between two languages, two cultures, two worlds are the result
of a bilingualism (or biography) that is in no way the consequence of colonial or political
domination” but can again “be explained by the weight of the unequal structure of the
literary world” and “the invisible power of the belief that ennobles certain languages and
[…] devalues others (281).
This dominance of the center over the periphery, however, does not explain the
motivation in the case of Lahiri. Indeed, once she begins to write in Italian, moving,
therefore, from English, the hyper-central language par excellence, to the peripheral
language that is Italian, she is very obviously swimming against the tide. For Lahiri,
the choice of exophonic writing stems from the unresolved hybrid identity she has
experienced up until this point in her life. Through Italian, she tells us, she has found a
way of reconciling her American and Bengali identities: “I think that studying Italian
is a flight from the long clash in my life between English and Bengali. A rejection of
both the mother and the stepmother. An independent path” (2016: 153). This analysis
is confirmed as typical of many multilingual subjects who associate troubling or even
traumatic events and relationships in their lives with one or more of their languages
and, therefore, find some form of respite in a second or third language. Jacqueline
Amati Mehler, writing as part of a group of multilingual psychoanalysts, notices how
“[o]ur attention was led to particular clinical situations in which analyst and patient
did not communicate in their ‘mother tongue’, but rather spoke in what was a second
language for one or both.” In such circumstances, “we soon recognized the deep
significance of memory, repression, splitting, and denial in their interweaving with
the different internalized languages, embedded in a complex network of multilingual
associations and pathways, within the stratifications of personal identity” (2003:
1076).
In trying to come to terms with her multiple identities, Lahiri describes her three
languages as a triangle, framing her portrait, where she sees herself as a fragmented
image, out of focus, in an empty space: “the void is my origin and also my destiny.
From that void, from all that uncertainty, comes the creative impulse. The impulse to
fill the frame” (2016: 159). The title of her memoir, In altre parole/In Other Words,
is emblematic. The words through which she has defined herself up until this point
are no longer sufficient. Lahiri explains how the title “implies a rejection. This time
I don’t accept the words I already know, the ones I should be writing with. I look for
others” (211). Significantly, in 2017, the book was published as a bilingual parallel
text: this editorial decision merits consideration and, indeed, has been the object of
some criticism. When adopted, the format of the parallel text is usually confined to
translations of canonical poetry and theater texts or as an aid for foreign-language

acquisition. Neither is the case here: this is an English-language publication, printed
both in the United States and the United Kingdom—but not in Italy. Printing the
source text and the target text together, side by side, inevitably draws attention to the
fact that English is a translation. For Tim Parks,
[t]he decision to publish the American edition of the book as a parallel text, Italian on the
left and English on the right, gives the curious impression that, though written in Italian—
indeed published first in Italian—the book is somehow not written for Italians; rather, the
achievement of Italian becomes a trophy to show off to the American reader (2016).
The juxtaposition is all the more striking because, as a general rule, Italian is
a “longer” language than English: this is due to a number of features including
Italian’s higher proportion of polysyllabic words and its reliance on prepositional
phrases instead of English’s more compact compound nouns. To get the two texts to
fit on opposite pages, therefore, the English has been printed in a slightly larger font,
creating a rather odd effect whereby the translation looms a little. While agreeing with
Parks that the physicality of the text is important, I feel that he is perhaps missing the
point when he describes the Italian version as a trophy to parade before her American
audience. The Italian might well be there to look at, rather than to be read, but this is
part of the pleasure to be had: it is a physical presence, these are the actual words, the
“altre parole” of the title that Lahiri is writing about, that she has struggled to learn
and this is the very book that she has ultimately succeeded in producing. Writing
about his own personal mix of languages, Homi Bhabha remarks on how “learning
to work with the contradictory strains of languages lived, and languages learned, has
the potential for a remarkable critical and creative impulse” (1994: x).4 And this is
what Lahiri experiences, the “creative impulse” born of “contradictory strains”. In
Lahiri’s case, this parallel compulsion to create through her writing while escaping the
conflict produced by her American-Bengali upbringing is fulfilled by her immersion
in the new language. Parks is again correct when he points out that Lahiri’s memoir
makes almost no mention of Italy, Italian culture, and Italian people. He criticizes
her for focusing almost uniquely on her relationship with the language but if we
return to Kramsch’s analysis of language acquisition, we can perhaps understand its
attraction for Lahiri:
For many language learners, desire is the need for a language that is not only an instrumental
means of communication, or a means of identification with some native speaker, but a way
of generating an identity for themselves, of finding personal significance through explicit
attention to articulation and meaning (15).
In altre parole is a love letter of sorts to Italian, this language that, ultimately,
Lahiri has chosen, and that, unlike English and Bengali, has not been imposed on her.
Although she might not control the language as well as she does English, conversely,
she does not feel controlled by it. For Lahiri, writing in Italian brings with it a sense of
imperfection and inadequacy which is, ultimately, experienced as something positive,
settling, as providing a fertile basis for creativity: “What does [this imperfection] offer
4 Emphasis in original.
206 M. Wardle
me? I would say a stunning clarity, a more profound self-awareness. Imperfection

inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect,
the more I feel alive” (2016: 113). Italian, as she experiences it, as an outsider to
the group, represents an escape from the burden of national and cultural identity. It
is precisely because she does not and cannot fully identify culturally with this new
language that Lahiri feels a weight has been lifted from her shoulders.
References
Amati Mehler, J. (2003). Book review: On borrowed words: A memoir of languages. Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association, 51, 1075–1082. https://doi.org/10.1177/000306510
30510032505.
Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
Blin, L. (2014). Found in translation: The standard in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies.”
Etudes De Stylistique Anglaise, 7, 165–181. https://doi.org/10.4000/esa.1311.
Briggs, K. (2018). This little art. Fitzcarraldo.
Casanova, P. (2004). The world republic of letters. Trans. M. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Heilbron, J. (1999). Towards a sociology of translation. European Journal of Social Theory, 2,
429–444. https://doi.org/10.1177/136843199002004002.
Hoffman, E. (1991). Lost in translation: A life in a new language. Minerva.
Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject. Oxford University Press.
Lahiri, J. (1999). Interpreter of maladies. Houghton Mifflin Company.
Lahiri, J. (2016). In other words. Trans. A. Goldstein. New York: Alfred A Knopf.
Lahiri, J. (2017). The clothing of books. Trans. A. Vourvoulias-Bush. London: Vintage.
Lecercle, J.-J. (1990). The violence of language. Routledge.
Lvovich, N., & Kellman, S. G. (2015). Introduction to special issue: Literary translingualism:
Multilingual identity and creativity. L2 Journal, 7, 2–5. https://doi.org/10.5070/l27125046.
Minzesheimer, B. (2003). For Pulitzer winner Lahiri, a novel approach. USA Today, August 19.
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2003-08-19-lahiri-books_x.htm.
Munday, J. (2016). Introducing translation studies. Routledge.
Parks, T. (2016). Why write in English. New York Review of Books, April 18. https://www.nyb
ooks.com/daily/2016/04/18/why-not-write-in-foreign-language/.
Skinner, J. (1998). The stepmother tongue. Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26898-6.
Spivak, G. (2012). The politics of translation. In L. Venuti (Ed.), The translation studies reader
(pp. 312–330). Routledge.
Venuti, L. (1998). The Scandals of translation: Towards an ethics of difference. Taylor & Francis.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203269701.
Wardle, M. forthcoming. Framing the writer: Paratextual elements in the work of Jhumpa Lahiri.
Chapter 14
Border Skirmishes: Questioning
Blurring Boundaries Between Fiction
and Nonfiction
Mary L. Tabakow and Staci Strobl
Abstract This study investigates reactions to an ongoing controversy about how

many, if any, completely fictional intrusions might be allowed in works labeled as
“nonfiction.” Presenting short stories at a 2019 North American Review Confer-
ence in Iowa (sponsored by the oldest literary journal in the U.S.), author Mary
Tabakow made key contacts and, along with co-author Staci Strobl, collected a small
sample of writers’ views via an anonymous questionnaire. A strong majority of
respondents, including three non-native English speakers, stated that they would
“Definitely Change/Somewhat Change” views about previously admired nonfiction
works if they “learned...it also contained key scenes, composite characters, dialogue
that were total fabrications.” Furthermore, in open-ended commentary at the end,
nearly half suggested some disclaimers/disclosures (or in-text signals) be required
by editors/publishers “up front” to avoid possible trust issues between readers and
writers. Clearly, more research is needed to assess how these sentiments might affect
large increases in nonfiction–over-fiction–sales recently, and if marketplace forces
might be fueling a growing trend to “embellish” nonfiction for readability.
Keywords Fiction · Nonfiction · Memoir · Embellishment · Creative hybrids
Introduction
Attending the North American Review (NAR) Conference in April 2019 to present
short fiction, author Mary Tabakow became aware of hints of discomfort/ tension in
a few sessions dealing with nonfiction (NF) that had attendees raising the possibility
of “permeability” or “penetrability” of borders between fiction and NF, especially
M. L. Tabakow (B)
American University in Dubai (Retired), Dubai, United Arab Emirates
e-mail: tabakowML@gmail.com
S. Strobl
Shenandoah University, Winchester, VA, USA
e-mail: sstrobl@su.edu
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_14
208 M. L. Tabakow and S. Strobl
in creative nonfiction (CNF). Despite being aware that CNF writers shaped nonfic-
tion pieces with careful attention to order/timing of material (such as devices of
structuring plot, rising action, climax, falling action) and character development of
a real person (documented physical description, perhaps habitual gestures or notice-
able speech habits if recorded), author Tabakow was introduced to a few unresolved
issues and, even, possible new category names for CNF. At the end of one session,
an educator nearby insisted that “experimental narrative nonfiction” might be more
logical, differentiating it from any graphic work. Some attendees/presenters used
other terms like “nonfiction hybrid” and “trans-genre”. Both David Shields’ influ-
ential Reality Hunger along with other works advocating mixed-genre hybridity on
one side and then John McPhee’s Draft No. 4 with Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir
on the other were mentioned to designate two poles of a factual accuracy continuum
(Karr, 2015; McPhee, 2017; Shields, 2010). As comments swirled, a key question
emerged: what avid readers, especially readers who were writers and academics,
might really think about the use of speculation/fantasy/fictional additions or embel-
lishments in works labeled NF? Consultation with co-author Staci Strobl resulted in
a short questionnaire for this targeted writerly and generally academic population.
Made available as both hard copy and electronic copy, 22 completed question-
naires (self-reported), mostly in electronic form, were returned. It was an admittedly
small, yet focused and informed sample. A few questionnaires were from non-native
English speakers, and the age range was somewhat surprising: 2 at ages 85/94, 4
at 75/84, 5 at 65/74, 3 at 55/64, 2 at 45/54, 1 at 35/44, and 5 at 25/34. Such a
range spread illustrates a key point that older writers and academics do not fade
away. It also shows the conference attracted a diverse group of teachers, writers,
academics, faculty, and students from the University of Northern Iowa, along with
colleges/universities around the U.S. and abroad. Also, several questionnaires came
back from non-NAR attendees and writer acquaintances as well.
Review of Literature
As was hinted at the 2019 NAR Conference regarding hybridity and seen more
frequently in discussions for literary conference topics (Modern Language Associa-
tion, 2019), there is still a great deal of controversy embedded in the many-faceted
genres of NF and CNF. Fictionalized history and historiography seem a case in
point. As researcher Richard Carroll predicted for traditional historians’ and histor-
ical novelists’ disputations in a final paragraph, “it appears that the troubles between
history and fiction will continue” (Carroll, 2011, para. 24). Apropos of this, co-author
Strobl, in a recent book on Bahrain’s past, alluded to issues about seemingly “disin-
terested history” having a particular perspective (Strobl, 2018, xx). As a result of that
perspective, tensions can be raised when “historical narratives” are used to forefront
a political or social agenda; thus, she emphasizes that “care must be taken... of points
of contestation” (Strobl, 2018, xxi). To confront this in the historical context, Strobl
referred to using triangulation as a beneficial, time-tested technique to corroborate
14 Border Skirmishes: Questioning Blurring Boundaries … 209
accuracy of data collection. It generally relies on two or more methods to glean the
same information with the possibility that results will come together to reveal similar
outcomes (Denzin, 2015; Heale & Forbes, 2013). Not surprisingly, triangulation and
mixed methods are widely employed in history and social sciences, as well as in
medical research (Heale & Forbes, 2013). However, even if NF writers used trian-
gulation to try to verify key facts to avoid the appearance of something “made up,”
tensions could certainly arise when a story or narrative is introduced, a contested
issue often brought up about works of CNF. However, the specifics of history-based
controversy are beyond the scope of this paper.
Debates and counter-debates on NF these days seem to reflect a re-evaluation of
what have been basic concepts, such as the reliability of memory and/or what a fact
might be. Best-selling NF writer Mary Karr put it succinctly; after reviewing major
faked memoir exposures in the past, she writes that there is a general pervading
climate of “cynicism about truth as a possibility” (Karr, 2015, 85) seemingly based
on an assumption “that the line between fiction and nonfiction is too subtle for us
to discern” (Karr, 2015, 86). David Shields, himself, has certainly contributed to
that, stating one characteristic of his version of hybridity would be “a blurring (to
the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction” (Shields,
2010, 5). An additional complication from the past is that, as stated by Suzanne Keen
in Narrative Form, “Narrative fiction before the novel often presented itself in the
guise of history, autobiography, confession, or travel narrative...,” adding that this
“feature... persists in narrative of both sorts in works that imitate actual documents”
(Keen, 2015, 134). Clearly, one can find concern about fiction in NF works over the
past 25 or more years and, after delving into the subject, learns it has a much longer,
varied literary history (Keen, 2015).
Opposing Points of View
However, when pondering Shields’ comment on history, “There are no facts, only
art,” at one end of a fact or truth-based continuum (Shields, 2010, 204) and then
McPhee’s advice, “You trim and straighten [words]—take the um’s...out, the false
starts—but you do not make it up” (McPhee, 2017, 100) at the other end, one realizes a
wide swath of literary territory exists between the two. Regarding that territory, Geoff
Dyer writes, in his individual essay about fiction and hybrid NF for The Guardian,
that aside from perhaps specifics of military actions, “the issue is not one of accuracy
but aesthetics” in dealing with hybrid texts (Dyer, 2015, para. 7). This comment
generally places him on Shields’ side for whose 2010 book, according to writer
Blake Morrison, Dyer wrote a positive comment that appeared on the cover/end
pages (Morrison, 2010). On the other hand, Karr flatly states, “Facts are the meat and
potatoes of writing... Informational writing tells, it doesn’t show,” but acknowledges
this can seem to challenge readers’ involvement (Karr, 2015, 123). Such sentiments
along with her verbal image of writing NF while resisting a “tarantula ego—starving
to be shored up by praise—[that] tries to scare me away from saying simply whatever
small true thing is standing in line in front of me” (Karr, 2015, xvi) places her closer
to the adherence-to-facts McPhee side.
“Untruth” in Nonfiction’s Recent Past History
At the risk of rehearsing what many are aware of, it seems important to bring up the
James Frey controversy because it erupted in public on television and resulted, after
a publishing pause, in disclaimer notes being added to later printed copies of a book
labeled “memoir” (Wyatt, 2006). Edward Wyatt states: “Oprah Winfrey rebuked
James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces on her television show yesterday
for lying about his past and portraying the book as a truthful account...,” (Wyatt,
2006, para. 1). In addition, he notes Winfrey’s ire seemed directed at both the author
and the publisher’s editor, and that Frey’s work had been “the fastest-selling book
in the Club’s 10-year history” at that time (Wyatt, 2006, para. 4). Growing negative
publicity eventually forced Frey’s publisher Random House to pay restitution to angry
readers, as well as jolted awareness within the publishing industry and among agents
and booksellers that untruth can be costly (Glaister, 2006). The revelations prompted
many key, basic questions. Victoria A. Brownsworth corroborated the specifics of
Wyatt’s account and raised the point: “Do writers who purport to write nonfiction—
journalists, memoirists, historians—have a responsibility to their readers to tell the
truth?” (Brownsworth, 2006, para. 10).
Aftereffects of the Frey controversy, including to Frey himself, seemed to cause
some re-evaluation and self-reflection. Regarding public perceptions of Frey’s case,
Samantha Katze notes a fellow attorney’s quip that “...anything published under
the memoir label... is the equivalent of a novel... that isn’t well-written enough to be
successfully marketed as fiction” (Katze, 2006, 207). However, from a commonsense
perspective, Katze observes that these days it is “... hard to imagine that individuals
fail to acknowledge the blurred line between fact and fiction, particularly when it
comes to sources of entertainment and artistic expression” (Katze, 2006, 208). More
recently, Frey’s saga and its aftermath have been mentioned by Alexandra Alter
in an article detailing a litany of revelations in the recent past of untruthfulness in
NF and publishers’ dismay about factual accuracy scandals (Alter, 2019). Though
some publishers acknowledge and “privately agree that they should be doing more,”
Alter writes, they have often “maintained that fact-checking every book would be
prohibitively expensive, and the responsibility falls on authors” (Alter, 2019, para.
2). On the other hand, one might argue this can result in financial losses for recalling
the work, retrieving unsold copies, and recycling the paper, as well as bad public
relations and lawsuits; therefore, the expense of fact-checking might be worth it. As
to this concern, McPhee observes: “Newspapers do not have discrete fact-checking
departments, but many magazines do,” which can greatly benefit a serialized book
(McPhee, 2017, 136); more pointedly, he adds: “The book publisher who, for early
marketing purposes, sets a text in stone before a magazine’s checking department
has been through it, gets what they deserve” (McPhee, 2017, 137).
Nevertheless, negative publicity and backlash over the Frey controversy did not
have the long-lasting predicted effect (as others had not before it, with some authors
still getting payments and new contracts); in fact, more scandals have followed (Alter,
2019; Brownsworth, 2006). Possibly, this is due to rising NF best-seller profitability,
marketplace forces, and worldwide media growth. It is true that The Association
of American Publishers (2019) finally released its StatShot Annual 2018 Report,
showing that
Non-fiction books (both adult and children’s & young adult) experienced the largest
percentage revenue growth for publishers over the past five years. Adult non-fiction revenues
grew 22.8% and children’s & young adult non-fiction revenues grew 38.5% 2014–2018. Unit
sales for adult non-fiction and children’s & young adult non-fiction grew 20.9% and 17.8%,
respectively, over the same five-year period. (para. 3).
Though recent furors over faked memoirs have eclipsed some even earlier back-
ground issues with untruth in NF, it is worthwhile to review at least one example.
Researching criticism of earlier “fact-altering” disclosures by iconic nonfiction
writers/ journalists, Jack Shafer wrote that they were basically untrustworthy in
their work, stating his evaluation with the title, “The Fabulous Fabulists: Mencken,
Liebling, and Mitchell made stuff up, too. Why do we excuse them?” His message
about their motives: they were not content with real stories and resorted to fiction,
noting their violations of readers’ trust for years while using evasive strategies
(Shafer, 2003). Though this is old news, it puts McPhee’s comments on truth-telling,
especially at The New Yorker after 1987, in context. Not surprisingly, McPhee devotes
an entire chapter to that magazine’s editorial policy and its enforcers, their “fact-
checkers” (McPhee, 2017, 129–155). He points out, somewhat tongue-in-cheek:
“Any error is everlasting” because “... once an error gets into print it will live on and
on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed, silicon-chipped, deceiving
researcher after researcher” (McPhee, 2017, 136).
Recent CNF Works and Authors’/Editors’ Comments
However, one finds CNF articles that touch both sides of the divide, such as in a text-
book entitled Writing creative nonfiction: Determining the form, with selections from
earlier conference papers (Tansley & Maftei, 2015). Responding to debates about NF,
CNF, and Shields’ Reality Hunger, the editors’ chosen articles, as chapters, seem an
eclectic mix. Explaining editorial decisions in their first chapter, Tansley and Maftei
write that in the current atmosphere of anger among readers about “‘discovering’
deceit and untruth in works released as non-fiction, suggesting a strictly binary way
of reading,.... [the] understanding of the fluidity of truth and fiction presented here
offers new...approaches” (Tansley & Maftei, 2015, 12). Among their pick of works,
for example, are a well-researched CNF piece on cancer, “At the Will of Our Stories”
by John I. MacArtney (MacArtney, 2015, 25–40) as well as “More Lies Please:
Biography and the Duty to Abandon Truth” by Glass (2015, 55–70). The first, using
research with fact-based personal experience, seems to find a better fit on the McPhee
side, while the latter, questioning the notion of “which versions” and “whose truth,”
nudges toward Shields’ position.
Positive Views of CNF and Hybrid Texts
In addition, many academics and, especially educators find positive aspects about
fiction’s place in NF and CNF. Some K-12 researchers, such as William P. Bintz and
Lisa M. Ciecierski, argue that “hybrid texts” in children’s and young adult (YA) liter-
ature can be used to help teachers interest students in factual material and, thus, meet
requirements of “the U.S. Common Core’s Anchor Standards for Reading” (Bintz &
Ciecierski, 2017, 61). Its use seems to give elementary/secondary school teachers
more options to provoke students’ curiosity by employing books or a reading series
that present information with a fictional narrator throughout or with periodic use of
short fictional depictions that acknowledge the made-up parts (Bintz & Ciecierski,
2017). It also shares similarities with an article by educators Natalia Ward, Robin
F. Schell, Clara L. Brown, and Betty Thomason that suggests “pairing fiction and
nonfiction texts” to elicit interest and discussion in an ESL setting (Ward et al., 2019,
193–194). In regard to college-age students, Katie Karnehm developed a longer
essay on the use(s) of a hybridized composite character based on an earlier confer-
ence paper. The revised essay, newly entitled “She and I: Composite Characters
in Creative Non-fiction,” takes readers through her decision to abandon first-person
narrative. Her reason: “Rather than writing the story of me, studying abroad, I wanted
to write the story of all of us” (Karnehm, 2015, 43). Other defenders of the utility
of mixing fiction with nonfiction include Annjeanette Wiese, whose article abstract
proposes finding a system in reading non-traditional “hybrid forms...which play
with the expectations we associate with fiction and nonfiction” (Wiese, 2015, 66).
She suggests this could “force us to reflect simultaneously on both fact and fiction,”
which is, she maintains, “the only way to say something true” (Wiese, 2015, 66).
Wiese’s analysis may possibly relate to Shields’ overall message, as well as in refer-
ences to other writings, that the main purpose is to arrive at a “poetic” or higher truth
(Shields, 2010).
Questioning Future Use of Fiction within Nonfiction
All the above raises a question about whether, “poetic” truths aside, fiction might
legitimately find a place in NF and CNF, and, if so, how can it really be done
within an accurate, fact-based narrative? According to narratologist Suzanne Keen,
one answer is: “Virtually every... formal aspect of narrative...can occur in nonfiction
without compromising its nonfictionality” (Keen, 2015, 127), especially if specified.
Indeed, one key issue might be informing the reader. To that point, Karr reiterates her
position that truth matters to her, yet she “would defend anybody’s right to move the
line for veracity in memoir, though I’d argue the reader has a right to know” (Karr,
2015, 10). Apropos of the reader’s interest, several 2019 NAR Conference attendees
suggested that speculative and fictional intrusions in NF should be clearly signaled
within the relevant text, and one questionnaire respondent mentioned this as well.1
Furthermore, Stephen B. Mettee cautions would-be NF and CNF writers to only
“use real-life anecdotes and quote real people” (Mettee, 2012, 33); to emphasize
the reason, he includes a sample book contract along with general advice on the
legalities of publishing (Mettee, 2012, 89–104). One might assume that attention to
this aspect reflects a reaction to the “Frey scandal” and others as cautionary tales.
Mettee’s contract example specifically states that “if there appears to be a risk of legal
action or liability, the Publisher may, at its sole option, (i) require the Author to make
such additions, deletions, modifications, substantiation of facts, or other changes, to
avoid the risk” (Mettee, 2012, 98). It seems a timely addition.
Explanation of Paper’s Research Question, Study,

and Questionnaire
The authors wanted to address a central question on the use of fictional elements in NF
works, wondering what kinds of answers might be forthcoming if readers, who were
also academics and writers, were asked about the use of speculation/fantasy/fictional
additions or embellishments in works labeled NF. As such, our sample was purposive
(not random) in nature and an extension of our academic and writerly networks.
Our research was also exploratory in nature, and although we believe there is a
representative relationship between our network and the general population of readers
of NF, we do not provide evidence of that here. Rather we approach this as a pilot
project for a later study using a demonstrably representative sample. As a pilot study,
we did not hypothesize about liked or disliked fictionalized elements in NF but rather
operated with a general expectation that our results would reflect a controversy,
evidenced by a wide range of opinion, and that the results could help us refine future
research on the topic.
Questionnaire Elements
To gather basic data, we devised a short anonymous questionnaire (for self-reported

answers) with three sections, available as a hard copy or electronic option. Section
1 In a recent email exchange, the Multi-Genre Editor at the North American Review Jeremy Schraf-
fenberger outlines a way that editors might handle situations when NF writers “take liberties” is
by “encouraging them... to make it clear in the writing itself that there is some imaginative or
speculative work happening” (email to M. Tabakow, 19 January 2020)
A asked basic questions about each participant respondent, such as educational

level, first language, age, writing preferences, publishing history within 5 years,
and literary preferences. Section B asked what definitions of terms each partici-
pant/respondent would/or would not accept as a base. Section C had a total of four
questions: 1a. asked if a participant/respondent had heard or read about the issue of
fictional elements added to nonfiction works without compromising its categoriza-
tion, with “Yes/Unsure/No” choices. However, questions 1b. and 1c. had Likert scale
choices. For example, 1b. asked whether or not the participant thought the definition
of nonfiction in the previous section was overly restrictive and whether it might be
time for it to be “challenged and reinvigorated,” while 1c. asked what the participant
would think if a nonfiction work or book she/he had admired was revealed to contain
key scenes, composite characters, dialogue that were total fabrications, and whether
or not this information would change her/his view of the work and/or the author. A
final question in Section C that was meant to be somewhat open-ended (2a.) asked
for comments and/or evaluations of two phrases related to the fiction in nonfiction
phenomenon: “the permeable boundary between fiction and nonfiction” and “the
penetrable border between fiction and nonfiction.”
Anonymous Questionnaire Results
Altogether, 22 questionnaires were returned, with 13 participants self-identified as

Male and 9 as Female. In Section A, the wide age range extended from 25/34 years
to 85–94 years, with all options represented. (See introduction note.) As to writing
output, 15 participants/respondents indicated they had published work within the
past 5 years, and two indicated a piece “in process.” In addition, 11 had a Ph.D.
degree, 3 had an M.A. degree, and 8 had a B.A., though not necessarily the youngest
participants. As to native language, 19 were native-English speakers, 2 were native-
Arabic speakers, and 1 was a native-Singhalese speaker. Furthermore, a majority
chose “Definitely Accept/Somewhat Accept” regarding all of the basic definitions in
Section B. However, there were a range of answers for Questions 1a, 1b, and 1c. in
Section C, shown in Table 14.1.
Somewhat surprisingly, nine respondents (almost half), mostly poetry/fiction
writers, answered “No” to 1a. above, seeming to not have much attended to the
ongoing issue of fictional intrusions/additions to NF works in recent years and
perhaps feeling “not particularly disturbed” about discrepancies, as one fiction-
writing respondent commented in answer to open-ended question Section C, 2a.
This may suggest that respondents tolerate some degree of embellishment in what is
purported to be NF and that the topic may have appeared slightly more controversial
in the minds of the study’s authors than others.
Table 14.1 Hypothetical reading situation answers from Questionnaire, Section C

1a. Have you seen Yes 10 Unsure 3 No 9
articles and/or
debates on
whether any
fictitious material
can be added to a
nonfiction work
without
compromising its
categorization as
“nonfiction”?
1b. Do you think Definitely not Possibly not Neutral 4 Somewhat Definitely
the definition of agree 6 agree 7 agree 3 agree 2
“nonfiction,”
mentioned above,
is overly
restrictive and it
might be time that
the first premise
of this category
“is challenged and
reinvigorated,” as
some critics say?
1c. If you learned Definitely not Possibly not Uncertain 2 Somewhat Definitely
that a nonfiction change 0 change 1 change 7 change 12
work/ book you’d
admired also
contained key
scenes, composite
characters,
dialogue that were
total fabrications,
would that affect
your view of other
aspects of the
work or, by
extension, the
author?
Some Respondents’ Differences in Opinion
Looking at questions 1b. and 1c., which drill down on the contours of the potential
controversy, there was a noticeable difference of opinion. However, the overall spread
of responses was not even, showing that there is likely a majoritarian or mainstream
perspective to be gleaned from the array. Specifically, in 1b. more people did not
agree with the notion that NF is too restrictive as a category to some degree than
were neutral or in agreement. This comports with our interpretation of 1a. above as
evidence of a certain amount of tolerance in the blurring of fiction and NF and that
Table 14.2 Summary of open-ended question’s response categories

Writers must Fiction in NF NF should NF hybrids Writers Texts need
keep firm NF breaks truth perhaps allow might need a should in-text
& Fiction “contract” hybridity but new category provide a wording to
Categories with the no new disclaimer or signal fiction
reader category notes in the in NF work
NF work
7 mentions 5 mentions 5 mentions 4 mentions 6 mentions 4 mentions
perhaps categories could better reflect reality if they were not as distinct. Secondly,
and even more so, most respondents to 1c. would have a changed opinion of an
author if they learned after the fact that the author had added fictional elements to
their NF work. This suggests the nuance that although there is some tolerance, there
is also a limit to that tolerance. As we see in exploring the open-ended responses,
the important nuance might be the degree to which the fictionalization is disclosed
to the reader at the time of reading (signposted within the work itself).
Questionnaire’s Open-Ended Comment Results
Keeping in mind the numbers from our admittedly small sample (as seen in Table
14.2) with a majority of participants expressing some need for change, it should be
noted that one participant did not add any commentary for question 2a in Section C.
In addition, some participants addressed more than one category in their 2a. response,
with a wide variety of individualized reactions and expressions of feeling. In fact,
two participants wrote a half-page or more, one adding a lengthy quotation from
novelist George Orwell’s novel 1984, as a response. Though a pointed and writerly
commentary, it could not be adequately categorized for 2a. in Section C.
As shown in Table 14.2, seven participants wrote they wanted to maintain tradi-
tional categories, though five were willing to allow hybrids (perhaps as experiments)
but did not wish to create a new category. (Note: Table 14.2 shows only the categories
with more than two mentions.)
Nevertheless, after combing through the open-ended responses, it seemed nearly
half of all participants’ comments (taken together) indicate both that “writers should
provide a disclaimer or notes in the NF work” (6) and that “texts need in-text
wording to signal fiction in NF work” (4). That these readers want to see signposts in
an “Author’s Note” or indications in-text about fictional insertions/embellishments
seems meant to send a strong message/question about what, exactly, they are reading
and, perhaps, a call for change. Furthermore, it may remind us of what might be
a common sentiment if, theoretically, someone might ask “why this matters.” One
answer is from Karr: “Well if I forked over a cover price for nonfiction, I consider it
my business” (Karr, 2015, 11).
The apparent call for signposting may also reflect a post-modern orientation
among respondents in which the idea of an absolute truth or reality is rejected in
favor of multitudes of subjective truths (and any given text gives the reader only one
of many truths about a given topic or situation). Such an orientation among respon-
dents then explains why the expectation that NF would be purely “true” is not overly
prevalent. The greater concern is that the blurring of fiction and NF should be apparent
to the reader as the work is being read in the form of some kind of disclosure. This is
reminiscent of a sociological turn toward self-analysis and “reflexivity” in reporting
field research. That is, social researchers are not neutral, objective third parties, but
rather have a position relative to what they are researching and reflect an informed,
but still subjective interpretation, termed “positionality.” Eduardo Gonçalves and
Marcelo Fagundes explain that such a researcher “. . . is a person with a background,
with certain characteristics that unavoidably say something about her [or him] on
the first glance” (Gonçalves & Fagundes, 2013, 338). Thus, it’s possible that the
researcher’s characteristics, such as age or speech, “may have some influence over
the fieldwork and how data is accessed” (Gonçalves & Fagundes, 2013, 338). Simi-
larly, respondents of our study may be acknowledging an author’s positionality with
respect to their experience of—or witnessing or recollection of—the topic at hand.
They might want information about to what degree they can understand that author’s
reliability in describing what is presented. Hence, they desire their relationship with
the text (and the author) to be a transparent one. In NF, unlike social research, the
positionality concern is about accuracy more broadly, rather than social identity,
specifically.
Conclusion
Given the continuously fought-over sprawling territory of nonfiction and despite the
many scandals over faked memoirs and fictional intrusions in other NF subgenres, the
authors hoped to start or contribute to a conversation about what the reader’s interest
is and how that interest is not being served by a lack of transparency in material
labeled “nonfiction,” printed by publishing houses and the greater publishing world.
Taking advantage of a brief opportunity to get responses from a more informed
sample of readers and writers, some representing a more international perspective,
seemed too good to pass by. That a majority of our participants said they would
“Definitely Change/Somewhat Change” their view of an admired NF work if they
later learned “it contained key scenes, composite characters, dialogue that were total
fabrications” seems significant, especially when one considers the profit being made
by the entire industry—$25.8 billion as calculated by AAP for 2018 alone—with
nonfiction books for all ages showing the greatest percentage of revenue growth
(AAP 2018). Clearly, more research needs to be done with larger samples and better-
framed questionnaires for a more international readership to learn more about the
role of marketplace forces in the overall equation.
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Chapter 15
The Cultural Imaginary in Mohsin
Hamid’s Exit West: A Transnational
Reading
Inas Younis
Abstract With the continuous flux of migrants and its subsequent transnational
practices, it becomes a trend in anthropology and social theories to view culture as
an imagined reality encapsulating memories, passions, images, and ideologies of “an
imagined community” rather than society’s constructs or common abstract beliefs.
This departure of culture from being institutionalized in the form of society and
restricted to specific inhabitants of a specific space into being a perception contributes
to establishing “cultural imaginary” in anthropological and transnational studies. In
this sense, culture is no more deserted and left behind. It migrates through both time
and space; it is borne, exchanged, nourished, and enriched. It acts as a stabilizer
and serves for the loss of relatedness and identity. Accordingly, it gives a sense of
settlement where home is no more one space but any space where migrants’ reali-
ties and cultures are imagined. This study attempts to bring out, in Mohsin Hamid’s
novel Exit West (2017), aspects of cultural imaginary born of the migrant commu-
nity’s experience who imagine their own reality in different entities. The analysis is
based on Benedict Anderson’s theory in his 1983 book Imagined Communities and
supported by Stuart Hall notions of cultural identities. The study is presented from
a transnational perspective.
Keywords Anderson · Hall · Imaginary · Cultural · Transnational · Exit West
Introduction
The “cultural imaginary” is a theory derived from different concepts in Latin Amer-
ican cultural studies. The term involves two concepts: imaginary and cultural. Gener-
ally, the concept of the ‘imaginary’ has long been used in psychoanalysis and soci-
ology. Now it is employed in Cultural Studies to analyze the collective identity and
the concept of a nation. The imaginary associated with culture provides a represen-
tation of specific imaginings of a particular culture. In this sense, it contributes to the
I. Younis (B)
Sadat Academy for Management Sciences, Cairo, Egypt
e-mail: inasyounis@hotmail.com
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_15
222 I. Younis
sense of unity that such a diverse body of American citizens internalize, for instance
(Bağlama, 2019,150).
There are many definitions of the concept of culture. From a traditional perspec-
tive, culture is an epitome of “the best that has been thought and said” in a society.
There is the “high culture” represented by the works of art and literature and the
“popular culture” which is embodied in the activities in the everyday lives of the
mass. Culture, from an anthropological and sociological point of view, describes
“the shared values” of a society. With the new cultural turn, it is more about mean-
ings rather than a mere “set of things” (Hall, 1997,1). In other words, participants of
a particular society think and feel the same way about the world around them. They
share the same meanings and common interpretations.
Yet, with the revolutionary cultural change, dealing with culture in a way that puts
emphasis on “shared meanings may sometimes make culture sound unitary” (2). For
this purpose, the study introduces Stuart Hall’s notion of culture as “a positioning”
since there is no one common culture, in his view, because people are different
and their interpretations of the world around them are different too. Anderson also
expands upon the notion of the migrant community imagining their own culture in
any space and focuses on the utilization of the people’s imagination to perceive them-
selves as a part of a group or a community through imagining a sense of communion.
Hamid explores Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities” and Stuart
Hall’s notions of culture combined in the cultural imaginary in Exit West in the
context of the twenty-first-century refugee crisis.
Exit West is a love story tangled in the struggle of a global refugee crisis and a
yearning to step away from the turmoil plaguing the city due to the violence, fear,
and grief surrounding the people. It progresses in a context fraught with grief and
violent disarray. Hamid’s deliberate choice of an unnamed city and normal people as
protagonists presents a timeless universal experience providing a city that could be
anyone’s and a relationship that is normal for any couple. Hamid’s novel is essential
because it illuminates the realities of the migration crisis, introduces an introspection
into the internal cultural dynamics of the migrants, and imagines a positive future of
migration. For this purpose, it has a direct relevance to the objective of the current
study.
This study attempts to bring out aspects of the cultural imaginary born of the
migrant community’s experience. It seeks to analyze the psychic dynamics of forced
migration and to examine examples from Exit West from a transnational point of view.
The study begins by establishing the conceptual framework and example definitions
of the “cultural imaginary”. The study also proposes a definition of the cultural
imaginary, relying on Benedict Anderson’s idea of the imaginary and Stuart Hall’s
definition of cultural identity. Both Anderson and Hall are interested in questions of
national and cultural identity formation, but they approach this issue from different
angles.
15 The Cultural Imaginary in Mohsin Hamid’s … 223
Review of Literature
Exit West has been dealt with from the perspectives of postcolonial studies and mobil-
ities studies. One of these studies is the article entitled “Waiting in motion: mapping
postcolonial fiction, new mobilities, and migration through Mohsin Hamid’s Exit
West, Mobilities” (2018) by Amanda Lagji. In this study, the focus is on the repre-
sentation of the waiting experience of the migrant after arriving in a new locality
and the temporality of the refugee camps. Cultural aspects are not addressed. Less
attention has been given to the cultural imaginary in Exit West. For example, “Mohsin
Hamid’s Exit West: Co-Opting Refugees into Global Capitalism” (2019) by Sercan
Bağlama though addressing the social, political, psychological, and cultural context
of the migration crisis, is more of “a political commentary with an aesthetic indi-
vidualization of social reality in order to analyze the narrative of the West about
migration and refugees” (Bağlama, 2019,150).
Most of the works dealing with Exit West take on mobility versus immobility. “As
if by Magic Realism: A Refugee Crisis in Fiction” (2018) by Oana-Celia Gheorghiu
addresses the role of magical realism in opening doors and presenting solutions to
the problem of accepting the other.
Theoretical Background
Cultural imaginary can be explained in terms of the notion of culture in Stuart Hall’s
terms and the imaginary in Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined community.
Hall presents two notions of cultural identity: The first notion defines culture as “one
shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more
superficial or artificially imposed selves, which people with a shared history and
ancestry hold in common” (1990, 223). In this sense, culture is a representation of
one event that fits in history and embodies the common historical experiences of one
nation.
The second notion pinpoints the differences which constitute “what we really are”
(225) and acknowledges the changes throughout history and the distinct differences
which constitute the uniqueness of a migrant’s experience, for example. According to
Hall, “This difference is inscribed in our cultural identities” (228) because the cultural
identities as described in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” are “constantly producing
and reproducing themselves a new, through transformation and difference.” In Hall’s
terms, culture is “not an essence but a positioning” and our cultural identities as
positionalities are “the names we give to different ways we are positioned by and
position ourselves within the narratives of the past” (Hall, 1990, 225). In this sense,
it is not a fixed ultimate truth and an ultimate scale of values but a process of growing
and becoming. Exit West is an interplay between the two notions of culture in which
the protagonists are trying to imagine their own communities.
224 I. Younis
The imaginary can be explained in terms of the concept of the “imagined commu-
nity” which is developed by Anderson because it is a way of identification for people
in any nation. It explains how the idea of a nation is formed, how national conscious-
ness is developed, and how one’s cultural imaginary is established. Anderson doesn’t
mean by “imagined” not real, but he means that we can socially or culturally construct
it in our perception and the practices that result from this perception are real. Anderson
identifies four elements of the imagined community summed up in his definition of a
nation as “an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited
and sovereign” (Anderson, 2016, 6). First, the nation is imagined; second, imagined
as limited; third, imagined as sovereign; and fourth, imagined as community. A brief
illustration of the theory will be presented and will be followed by its application on
the novel. The analysis will only focus on the three elements in the construction of
the idea of a nation as imagined, imagined as limited, and imagined as community
because they have direct relevance to the cultural focus of the present study. The
nation as a sovereign will not be analyzed through the novel.
Part of the construction of the cultural identity of a nation includes imagining
some connection to each other based on how the people of one nation perceive
themselves as a homogenous body despite having never met the other members. It
is imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most
of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each
lives the image of their communion” (6). Accordingly, members of such an imagined
community weave their narratives and imagine them as one in the collective common
culture.
The nation is imagined to be limited because each nation occupies a distinct
geographical location on the political map where there are borders and boundaries
to define each nation. The construction of our national cultural identity similarly
meets around the same political map whereby each nation and its people identify
themselves as part of one in the same community. In this sense, the geography
of a nation determines its political, cultural, and historical relations of power. In
other words, power is related to one’s place on the geographical and political map.
Accordingly, if someone belongs to a powerful country, he comes from a powerful
position and his acts, behaviors, and cultural practices come from the same source.
This is explained in Hamid’s words (2017), “Geography is destiny” (11).
The nation is imagined as community. This concept of community ignores very
real “inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always
conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 2016, 7). This is an ideal-
istic idea of community without fully acknowledging that people have very different
experiences. Everyone in a nation might be able to call themselves citizens but some
may be deprived of equal rights of citizenship. This disparity and deliberate inequality
in a nation shape one’s social and cultural imaginary.
A concrete example of an imagined community in which people position them-
selves within a new narrative is best illustrated in the migrant situation in the United
States. Migrants from Central and South America, dissatisfied with their life condi-
tions, try to emigrate to the USA. Yet, they have been declined US citizenship for
not being legally documented. As a result, they live and work on the borders of both
countries. Accordingly, they try to imagine a community that is different from both
Mexico, or their home country, and the USA. In this sense, they represent Hall’s
second notion of culture as positioning. “Unable to be incorporated in the “imagined
communities” of either an American nation-state or a Mexican one, migrants imag-
inatively craft their own worlds informed by the loss and displacement they face”
(Camacho 2008, 6).
What unites Anderson and Hall with Hamid is the fundamental need of human
beings to belong. Anderson describes a specific way of fulfilling the need to belong
which results in the construction of the idea of a nation as an imagined community
that one shares with the other members of a nation. Anderson tries to understand why
many people sacrifice themselves for other people of the same nation that they might
have never met. In his opinion, this irrational emotional attachment has cultural roots
which he refers to as The Unknown Soldier. Indeed, this need to belong can be consid-
ered the driving force behind constructing imagined communities which formulate
themselves as a nation by using culture. This idea brings us to Hall, whose notion of
cultural identity suggests two forms of expression of the need of belonging, one of
which complements Anderson’s theory- which is the common collective culture and
the idea that there is one true self with many other selves inside it.
In Exit West, Hamid paints a fuller picture by acknowledging Anderson’s idea of
a nation being an imagined community that one shares with the other members of a
nation and the complementary notion of Hall’s shared cultural identity as one form
of expression of the need to belong. Yet, he criticizes Anderson for disregarding
the other forms of expression of the need to belong by introducing Hall’s second
notion of cultural identity as positioning. Hamid has created an imagined situational
and cultural context which contrasts two versions of the imagined community and
cultural imaginary. The first being an imagined community in one’s home connected
to the common culture based on similarities enacted by Saeed and an imagined
community welcoming differences and multiplicity of cultures in the new refugee
location enacted by Nadia. This cultural situation established by Hamid proves that
sharing a community based on similarities only and not differences is not the only
way to fulfill the need to belong.
Indeed, the idea of the imagined community unified by an imagined culture
sharing an imagined sense of communion, in Anderson’s sense, involves that irra-
tional emotional attachment to one’s nation. According to Anderson, such limited
imaginings explain why millions of people are willing to die and sacrifice them-
selves for such a perceived imagined community. The people of a nation commit
themselves to a shared fabrication of a common culture uniting them. It becomes a
problem when that imagined sense of unity and communion is used against other
people of another nation in the sense that it prioritizes the love of the nation above
the love and compassion for human beings. The riots of the anti-migrant nativists
in London in Exit West which was provoked by the imagined sense of communion
stated in the slogan “reclaim Britain for Britain” provides an explanation of what
Anderson called “imagined community” (Hamid 2017, 135).
226 I. Younis
Cultural Imaginary
According to Graham Dawson (1994), the “cultural imaginary” refers to “those vast
networks of interlinking discursive themes, images, motifs and narrative forms that
are publicly available within a culture at any one time, and articulate its psychic and
social dimensions” (48). Another understanding of the cultural imaginary can be
summed up in Susanne Hamscha’s (2013) words:
‘America’ and ‘Americanness’ are concepts that are not so much tied to the united states as
a nation than to a set of myths, symbols, fantasies, ideals, and desires, which I would like to
subsume under the term ‘cultural imaginary’. (26).
Yet, from a transnational perspective and in view of both Anderson’s idea of the
imaginary and Hall’s second notion of culture, cultural imaginary, in the researcher’s
view, can be considered as the utilization of people’s imagination to produce imag-
ined communities positioning themselves into a new narrative based on their own
differences. It is about the construction of cultural identity, the making of difference,
and the weaving of cultural narratives. In a word, it is a synthesis of positionalities
and imagined communities. This connection comes from the idea that both Anderson
and Hall advocate the potential of perception and imagination in restoring cultural
identity. It is how we perceive the moment-by-moment interaction we are having
with people in terms of our power to affect and be affected by change that constitute
our positionalities.
In the present study, it is only through the second notion of Hall that we can
explain the traumatic experience of the forced migrants arriving to a new location
leaving behind all connections to a collective culture. In this experience, the migrants
are positioned by the force of common culture, stability, and continuity, their own
narrative of their past lives. Yet, finding themselves in a new location, they position
themselves by the force of pain and fear induced by “loss and displacement” within
a new narrative (Camacho 2008, 6). Therefore, they imagine a community of their
own and construct their culture in their own perception.
Discussion and Analysis
An analysis of Hall’s culture and Anderson’s imagined communities which formulate

themselves as nations by using culture, and culminated into the cultural imaginary,
will be explored in Hamid’s Exit West through a critical analysis of themes, characters,
and structural techniques. An analysis of cultural implications and intercultural praxis
is going to be examined through the juxtaposition between the two main characters:
Saeed and Nadia. The narrative shifts and the magic realism are the two structural
techniques analyzed in the present study.
Themes and Characterization
Nation as Imagined in Exit West
Hamid, through an exit plan of two young people struck by fear and uncertainty,
creates an imagined situational and cultural context whereby two versions of the
imagined community in Anderson’s terms are presented. An imagined community in
one’s home enacted by Saeed and an imagined community in the new location enacted
by Nadia. Saeed and Nadia’s interaction with each other and with other people, in
their migration journey, is fraught with cultural implications and intercultural praxis.
Nadia and Saeed’s different ways of acclimating to new contexts are on full display
in London while they are trying to accustom themselves to life in the mansion of
refugees. Open to change, Nadia is excited by the multicultural spirit of the house
and the idea that people from different cultures can connect despite their differences.
She rejoices in the idea that a community might form, and a sense of communion is
imagined among people who have never met before. This is exactly the utilization of
imagination that Hamid is calling for, the cultural identity as positioning as proposed
by Hall and the nation as imagined according to Anderson. She thought “a degree of
order could be built. Maybe even a community” (Hamid 2017, 131).
At the beginning, Nadia has trouble understanding what is taking place in the
meeting held by the Nigerian migrants, then she managed to track the conversa-
tions because they “spoke different variations of English; different Englishes … for
her English is like theirs, one among many” (Hamid 2017, 148). This diversity of
languages and cultures sets the ground for communication; therefore, Nadia was
keen to attend the meetings because:
they represented something new in her mind, the birth of something new and she found
these people who were both like and unlike those she had known in her city, familiar and
unfamiliar…she found their seeming acceptance of her, or at least tolerance of her. (148–149).
Nadia began to imagine herself as one of them. In other words, she feels that
she is part of the community (of the Nigerians in the refugee mansion) which is
imagined. She has experienced a unification of different cultures and nationalities.
In her country, there was a division between the government and the radical militants,
and everyone should perform loyalty to the faction in power. Nadia’s freedom from
the collectivity of her culture that is imposed upon her by the limits of being born and
living on a specific territory is comfortable for her. Yet in the mansion in London,
she has an entity of her own; she is an individual in a diverse group allowing herself
to be whoever she wants without hiding her distinct identity. This contrasts with
the situation in Mykonos refugee camp where individuals are grouped according
to nationality, determined by each group’s position on the political map, and are
dealt with as “one people” reflecting a common history in Hall’s terms of the notion
of culture as “one essence” (Hall, 1997, 1). Even fellows from her own country
whom Saeed thought would share with them a sense of community were divided
among themselves. In Mykonos, they are “people of many colors”, but “Everyone
was foreign, and so in a sense, no one was” (Hamid 2017, 106).
228 I. Younis
On the contrary, Saeed has found it extremely difficult to imagine himself as part
of a group of people from other cultures on the assumption that his ties with his own
community is forming a resistance force against imagining a communion outside
the geographical and cultural boundaries of his own nation. Unlike Nadia, Saeed is
uncomfortable with the idea of being isolated from his culture. He suffers from the
uncertainty and fear that have migrated with him to the new environment. “He was
the only man from his country… and he was alone. This touched upon something
basic, something tribal, and evoked tension and a sort of suppressed fear” (Hamid
2017, 149–150). He is not open to new varieties of life. He cannot communicate
with people who speak different languages. He is committed to his reality as part of
a nationality. He is always in search of his country’s fellowmen whom he has never
met and will never know. In the “house of people from his country, Saeed began to
spend more time there, drawn by the familiar languages and accents and the familiar
smell of the cooking…and he joined his fellow countrymen in prayer” (151).
Such difference between Nadia and Saeed can be interpreted in terms of the
significant differences between individuals in respect to the way they imagine their
community and their lives; “the way people imagine their social existence, how they
fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows” in a specific
context (Taylor, 2004, 23). Nadia is eager to migrate, and she is open to the idea of
change and new life. She is “more comfortable to all the varieties of movement in
her life”. On the other hand, “Saeed desperately wanted to leave his city… but in his
imagination… only temporarily” (Hamid, 2017, 94).
Nation Imagined as Limited in Exit West
The refugee crisis in Exit West will be analysed with respect to two points: the borders
and the refugee camp. There are two types of borders in Hamid’s Exit West: physical
and cultural borders. Both influence our perception of the cultural community we
imagine and the attempt at transcending the cultural barrier cannot be attained without
transcending physical borders even if it is in our perception. Physical borders are set
by militants and governments in the novel. It is the kind of border that governments
believe will curb immigration and keep the people in their place through building
walls, motion detection equipment, barbed wires, and other forms of surveillance.
“The border is not a physical barrier that divides “us” from “them”, but rather a regime
comprised of actions by individuals and groups, assemblages of paper, surveillance
images, and data transfers, …” (Cortes et al., 2015, 57). The physical borders could
be represented in Exit West in “a tightening cordon being put in place…soldiers and
armed vehicles, and … drones and helicopters” (Hamid 2017, 137). It could also be
“a security camera” or “a lip-reading software” (92).
The nation is imagined as limited by borders which are not natural but constructed
politically to define who lives inside and who is kept out, who belongs, and under what
conditions belongs. The reflection Nadia made while she and Saeed were looking at a
picture of a city with all the lights turned off is an image of the imagined community
without borders. The picture shows different localities sharing the same sky; “the
same sky but at different time” (Hamid 2017, 56). This image is completely opposite
to Anderson’s version of a nation imagined to be limited with borders defined by the
geographical place on the political map. In Exit West,
Nadia thought about this. They were achingly beautiful, these ghostly cities - New York,
Rio, Shanghai, Paris – under their stains of stars, images as though from an epoch before
electricity, but with the building of today. Whether they looked like the past, or the present,
or the future, she couldn’t decide (57).
There are two factors that have played a crucial role in building communities
without borders and increasing interconnectedness. They are technology and the
flow of people. Technology is represented by the cell phone and all other forms
of media. Borders are obliterated and geography collapses in the imagined nation
with technology. The world witnesses a complete collapse of both distance and time.
Technology makes borders porous and fluid. According to Hamid, we can easily
browse and be in Australia in seconds and a skype connection would transcend both
time and distance (Brown, 2018, 4:24).
The flow of people altered social geography. Accordingly, crossing cultural bound-
aries becomes possible and feasible. In Exit West, transcending borders is achieved by
introducing the different portals through which people can easily find themselves in
another country. They are the magical doors, the cell phone, and the telescope. “The
imaginary doors refer to the desire to have no borders or even move easily between
nations” (Hamid 2017,72). The cell phone is another portal that takes someone out
of the dreadful reality.
In their phones were antennas and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by
magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places
distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be. (Hamid, 2017, 39).
The telescope is another portal that helps escape stress and devastating reality.
The telescope for Saeed is a way of escaping every day’s violence and conflict in
his city, whereas for his father it is a “time – travel” experience that takes him back
into the past (Hamid 2017, 14). For both, it is a way of transcending the current
tumultuous circumstances.
Yet, more focus in the current study is on borders as cultural boundaries and
the refugee camp is a miniature of the new imagined community. Cultural borders
separate on two levels: the nativists and xenophobic residents who are provoked
by fear and hatred to reject new migrants and the migrants who divide themselves
according to national or cultural affiliation inside the refugee camps. The volunteer in
the clinic in Mykonos camp who managed to “put both Nadia and Saeed on the back
of her scooter … and dashed inside and there was a door” is an example of empathy
and the ability to connect across cultural boundaries that Hamid believes the world
should adopt (2017, 118). Her commitment to help Saeed and Nadia exit through
one of the doors indicates that forming a cross-cultural relationship is possible and
that human compassion is the only way to hold the world together.
230 I. Younis
Another example is the nativist young woman who despite her fear of the angry
migrants, continued her way to the zoo to rescue the trapped immigrants. Her ability
to understand the needs of fellow human beings who happen to be migrants dismantle
her fear of their being different from her and transcended cultural boundaries imposed
by being limited to a specific bordered place. Her deed is considered an attempt to
counteract this culture of fear.
She boarded the train and founded herself surrounded by men who looked like her brother
and her cousins… except that they were angry, they were furious… that she felt fear… and
thought that anything could happen… and she worried they might seize her, and stop her,
and hurt her, but they didn’t… she thought for a while, and then she gathered her courage,
and she began to walk, and not in the direction of her apartment… but in the direction of the
zoo. (Hamid 2017, 110).
The migration problem is a product of the system of power dictated by the social,
political, and historical relations of power a specific nation’s geographical position
produces. Such position of a nation drastically influences its people’s perspective of
power and dictates their intercultural praxis. An example from Exit West is the man
in Tokyo who was looking down at the two girls from the Philippines. “He disliked
Fillipinos. They had their place, but they had to know their place” (Hamid 2017, 31).
Indeed, Fear generates social and cultural boundaries. Most of the discourse about
migrants taps on fear. It evokes fear of other people that are different from us. It is
a fear of difference because the difference is considered a threat. Dismantling this
kind of fear whether among migrants and nativists or among migrants themselves is
presented as the solution in Exit West.
Nation Imagined as Community in Exit West
Hamid emphasizes the notion of interconnectedness and communion as Saeed reflects

on the way in which the world is held together. He imagined the lemon tree in Nadia’s
terrace physically connected to the soil, the pot, the terrace, and the building in an
image that includes all humanity. He suggests a solution for all our conflicts. It
is the peace coming from the idea that we are all ‘fragile’ and interconnected. It
is an image representing Anderson’s idea of a nation imagined as community and
Hamid’s dream of an “imagined community” where its members deserve to have the
same rights, peace, and love; “that peace should come from them all, for everyone, for
everything, for we are so fragile, and so beautiful and surely conflicts could be healed”
(Hamid 2017, 46). Saeed imagined the community as “horizontal comradeship” in
Anderson’s terms where disparity and inequality are disregarded. The same lemon
tree which was once a symbol of life when moved from Nadia’s house to Saeed’s
mirrors the suffering of the migrants in a new place. When uprooted and planted in
another place, it lost its ability to blossom exactly like migrants who are forced to
leave home and cannot easily recover in a new place unless they imagine a community
and the culture it connects them with that imagined community. “Nadia’s lemon tree
did not recover, despite repeated watering, and it sat lifeless on their balcony, clung
to by a few desiccated leaves” (93).
Indeed, the aggression and violence against migrants lie at the core of every
migrant’s cultural identity and imbue it with a meaning. None of us look at the
migrants’ sufferings without sensing the pain of separation, the loss of hope for a
better life, the pessimistic political nostalgia, the uncertainty, the fear, and the loss
of the sense of identity and belonging. Such repetitive experiences of oppression,
unfairness, and rejection throughout history played a critical role in the emergence
of many of the social movements in our life. An example of such movements is anti-
immigration. Hamid explains this in Exit West through the reactions of the nativists
whose suppression of fear of migrants is behind the violence against them, the reac-
tions of the army trying to keep migrants within the borders of the refugee camp
designed to limit their integration into the new community as in Mykonos in Greece
and dark London, and the reactions of the migrants who are surrounded by fear. Such
associated meanings pop up with every flow of humanity across ages allowing no
room for healing, and no hope of integration. These associations constitute powerful
spurs of resistance against any attempt of restoration, any future prospect of adapting
to a new community and accordingly any potential cultural imaginary.
The difference in the experience should be highlighted, and migrants should not
position themselves within the old collective narrative of oppression dictated by the
power of a nation. Everyone can imagine a new community and a distinct conception
of culture. The attempt to obliterate the difference which characterizes people’s
migration experiences played a crucial role in determining their cultural attitude
toward moving. Usually, people are neither optimistic about the future nor satisfied
with the present. They cannot imagine the future and they keep analyzing the present
negatively. For this reason, they keep dwelling on the past and the nostalgic views
related which does not help in articulating a better future. An example of a forced
migrant who clings to his nostalgia of the past as an escape from positioning is
Saeed in Exit West. Saeed’s inability neither to integrate into a new community nor
to produce an imaginary culture explains how our relationship to the past and our
imagination of the future dictate how our cultural imaginary is formed. According
to Anderson, “Imagined communities […] always loom out of an immemorial past,
and still more important, glide into a limitless future” (2016, 11–12).
Structural Techniques
Hamid has employed different techniques to represent a unique universal experi-

ence in an innovative way. Among these techniques are narrative shifts and magical
realism. A narrative shift is a shift in perspective that may involve a change of loca-
tion, a change of time, or both. Hamid has done this through integrating a number
of vignettes where he describes briefly a single moment in one’s life to capture a
quick impression. This technique contributes to the photographing of simultaneous
actions whereby the reader experiences the compression of time and space. The
short vignettes which carry the reader to Sydney, Tokyo, Vienna, Amsterdam, and
Marrakesh are employed by Hamid to indicate the inevitability of moving across the
232 I. Younis
globe. In other words, “the whole planet was on the move, much of the global south
headed to the global north, but also southerners moving to other southern places and
northerners moving to other northern places” (Hamid 2017, 169). In other words, it is
an imagined way of transcending temporal and spatial boundaries. “As Saeed email
was being downloaded from a server and read by his client far away in Australia, a
pale skinned woman was sleeping alone…” (7).
An outstanding example of the technique of vignettes is when Hamid reflects on
the old lady, who lives in the hills outside Marrakesh, and has never left not only
her town but also her house. Yet, she is considered a migrant, for she is exposed
to a similar lifelong migration experience. “We are all migrants through time” and
“everyone migrates even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives” (Hamid
2017, 209). Through this vignette, Hamid indicates the universality and timelessness
of the migration experience.
The magic and realism that are smoothly integrated into the harmony of the text
present Exit West as a magical take on the refugee crisis. Magical realism allows
migrants a space to inhabit a variety of identities in new communities creating possi-
bilities for cultural imaginary that yields to difference instead of violence, rejection,
and contempt. A striking departure from reality in the novel is the magic doors facil-
itating the mobility of people across spaces in a compression of time. Hamid said,
“I think those doors kind of already exist. We seem to leave our houses and be in
different parts of the world almost instantaneously- drive to the airport, get on an
aircraft, and fly” (Brown, 2017, 1:28).
Stepping through black magical doors transporting people across different places
instantly is a prediction of a positive promising future void of any borders. Though
the doors in the novel are magical inexplicable elements according to the laws of
the universe, they are real in life. According to Hamid, while the doors are not true
to physics, they are true to emotional reality. “The doors became a way to describe
a reality that actually exists in a way that feels true to that reality even if it is not
true to physics” (Brown, 2017, 1:34). Indeed, stepping through the doors is crossing
actual geographical borders and the collapse of time and disintegration of distance
are products of the inherent disruptive potential in magic realism. The magic doors
seem to highlight how Hamid disregarded the physical journey of the couple, but
actually, it was an attempt at depicting them like everyone because if they have
gone through physical journey, they would have suffered, and we usually tend to see
plighted people as different from us.
The magical realism in the novel allows Hamid to imagine a different future where
“everyone migrates” and the migration experience is an everyday activity. It is not
only an escape from the present reality but also a new visualization of a new life.
Hamid’s optimistic view of the future depends on the cultural imaginary of each
migrant and his ability to perceive one. For this purpose, Exit West is an invitation
to the utilization of the potential of imagination. Hamid states:
It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures for oneself,
and not just in Marine, but in the whole region…, the apocalypse appeared to have arrived
and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring, they were
not the end, and life went on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to
be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not
unimaginable now… (2017, 217).
Hamid justifies his employment of magic realism elements in Exit West during
the Q&A session on PBS as an inspiration of the magic of technology:
So, right now, most of us have a little black rectangle in our pocket […] and when we
look at it, our consciousness goes far, far away from our bodies, like magically appearing
somewhere else, looking at your phone, and suddenly you’re reading about the moon or
Mars or Antarctica (Brown, 2018, 4:24).
Conclusion
Exit West presents an optimistic view of a universal human crisis through imagining
a positive future of migration. Indeed, building up two imagined communities that
are based on different perceptions is what makes Exit West remarkably interesting.
The imagined community in Nadia’s situation is grounded in dismantling fear of
the difference, and in crossing cultural and psychological boundaries. However, the
imagined community in Saeed’s situation is a continuous pursuit of his connection
with his home country, ties with religious practices, home, friends, and even the food
he used to eat. Both imagined communities of Nadia and Saeed seek communion
with people whom they have never met and will never know in Anderson’s sense.
They both have managed to produce their own pattern of the imaginary culture. The
difference is that Saeed is tied to a specific territory determined on the political map.
Yet, Nadia is tied to nowhere.
This sense of communion usually happens when the people imagine that they are
all human beings and that the difference whether in language, culture, appearance,
place, or religion is normal and acceptable. When the people learn to acknowledge
the differences, to understand the needs and rights of others, and to accept the fact
that our human lives and experiences are not the same, and they do not fit in history
as one experience, they will stop positioning people according to the place they come
from but according to the different experiences they undergo as Hall suggested.
In a word, the cultural imaginary contributes to building up narrative patterns
about a particular community which prepares the members of a community to either
accept change or refuse it. The cultural imaginary in this respect helps to define
identity and creates a sense of relatedness to a particular time, place, and community
in a setting of neither belonging “here nor there” in Hamid’s terms. This shared space
or bond by imagined culture is what makes the imaginary. It gives people a sense
of the communion that they lost and are always in pursuit of. Indeed, it provides a
compensation for the loss of the sense of belonging which is attached to the migrant
experience as depicted in myriad examples in Hamid’s Exit West.
234 I. Younis
References
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Bağlama, S. (2019). Mohsin Hamid’s exit west: Co-opting refugees into global capitalism. New
Middle Eastern Studies, 9(2), 149–158. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335564410_
Mohsin_Hamid’s_Exit_West_Co-Opting_Refugees_into_Global_Capitalism.
Brown, J. (2018). “Exit west: Author Mohsin Hamid answers your questions” You Tube video,
12:38 posted by “PBS News Hour”. Retrieved March 30, 2018, from https://www.pbs.org/new
shour/show/exit-west-author-mohsin-hamid-answers-your-questions.
Brown, J. (2017). Magical novel ‘Exit West’ explores what makes refugees leave home” You Tube
video, 5:58 posted by “PBS News Hour. Retrieved March 16, 2017, from https://www.pbs.org/
newshour/show/magical-novel-exit-west-explores-makes-refugees-leave-home.
Camacho, A. (2008). Migrant imaginaries: latino cultural politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.
New York UP.
Cortes, M. et al. (Eds.). (2015). New keywords: Migration and borders. Cultural Studies, 29(1),
55–87.
Dawson, G. (1994). Soldier heroes: British adventure, empire and the imaging of masculinity.
Routledge.
Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Sage
Publications, Inc.; Open University Press.
Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture,
difference. Lawrence and Wishart.
Hamid, M. (2017). Exit West. Riverhead Books.
Hamscha, S. (2013). The fiction of America: Performance and the cultural imaginary in literature
and film. Campus Verlag.
Lagji, A. (2018). Waiting in motion: mapping postcolonial fiction, new mobilities, and migration
through Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Mobilities. Retrieved October 30, 2018, from https://www.
tandfonline.com, https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2018.1533684.
Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press.
Chapter 16
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
as Mediated by Kamil Kilānı̄:
A Bourdieusian Account
of the Translator’s Habitus
Khulud M. Al-Mehmadi
Abstract This paper is part of an ongoing Ph.D. project studying the translation
of children’s literature in the Arab world as viewed through the sociological lens
of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s theory has been broadly applied in agent-oriented
research in translation studies. The concepts developed by Bourdieu, namely field,
habitus and capital, provide effective analytical models for investigations into the
socio-cultural contexts in which translations occur. Bourdieu’s theoretical framework
contributes toward understanding the relationship between the choices a translator
makes at the micro-level, as well as stimuli at the macro-level. This paper uses Kamil
Kilānı̄’s (1897–1959) translation of Gulliver’s Travels (1931) as a testing ground for
the translator’s agency. The paper has two objectives. First, it aims to shed light on
the field of children’s literature in the early twentieth century Egypt by examining the
social structure of Egypt at the time. Understanding the field of children’s literature
as a fully fledged field entails considering other fields with which it is homologous.
The second aim of this paper is to focus on the micro-level with an analysis of the
interventions of the translator at the textual and paratextual levels. This analysis will
be performed by focusing on the translator’s initial and professional habitus, that is,
his early socialization through to his education and professional work.
Keywords Sociology · Habitus · Capital · Field · Children’s literature · Gulliver’s

travels
Recently, scholars in the field of translation studies have increasingly shown interest
in drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986, 1990, 1998) key concepts of field, habitus
and capital as analytical tools to comprehend the translator’s/interpreter’s choices
(Simeoni, 1998; Sela-Sheffy, 2005; 2005; Meylaerts, 2010). In doing so, scholars
can approach the “practice of translation as a social activity [that is] organized and
regulated through social forces” (Sela-Sheffy, 2000, 2005, 1–2, italics in original).
K. M. Al-Mehmadi (B)
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
e-mail: ml13kma@leeds.ac.uk
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_16
236 K. M. Al-Mehmadi
Fig. 16.1 The metaphor of social space as a football field (Harrison, 2014)
The interrelationship of these three concepts is significant, so they cannot be under-

stood separately from each other. Therefore, these three concepts will inform the
conceptual framework of this paper.
Bourdieu used different terms to refer to field, such as “market” and “game”
(Hanna, 2006, 42). Bourdieu associated the term “market” with the distributions of
products according to the value attached to them, whether symbolic or economic.
The other term, “game”, is associated with the rules that agents must follow in order
to be members of a certain field. In this article, the explanation for the field will be
discussed in light of “market” and “game.” This will aid in exploring the translation
of children’s literature into Arabic as a field from the 1920s to the 1960s in the early
twentieth century in Egypt.
Bourdieu likened the idea of a social field to field-games, specifically to a football
pitch. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, 97) asserted that a field, unlike a game, is “not
the product of a deliberate act of creation [but] it follows rules or, better, regularities,
that are not explicit and codified.” Using the analogy of a football field, Bourdieu
attempted to explain the interrelationship of his sociological concepts: field, capital
and habitus (Maton, 2014). A delineation of this analogy is visually represented in
Fig. 16.1.
Bourdieu’s analogy comparing a social field to a football field was favorably
received by Addison (2016, 7) who described it as “a useful metaphorical tool that
helps the analyst to (…) make sense of the logic orienting people.” Thomson (2014)
explained Bourdieu’s understanding of a social field as a football field in detail. A
football field is a specified area with boundaries where a game is played. Thomson
(2014, 66) stated: “it is a square with internal divisions and external boundary” where
players stand in predetermined positions. The positions of these players as an attacker
or as a defendant depend on the rules of the game, which the players must learn,
especially novice players, in order to play the game well. All the players participate
in a game that they think is worth playing. The rules of the game are set; each player
16 Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as Mediated by Kamil Kilānı̄ … 237
occupies a certain position in the football field in relation to his/her skills. These are
the basic elements that shape and inform the players’ decisions, that is, where they
can go and what they can do. Similarly, a social field is the place where players,
either individuals or institutions, act and interact with each other. Entrance into a
field requires at least the minimum amount of capital required in that particular field.
The position of the social agents in the field is determined by the type and amount
of capital they possess. The type and amount of capital depends on the field. Thus,
those who enter the field must have the essential capital needed for that field and
the basic skills to play the game well in order to master the field (Thomson, 2014).
Bourdieu explained that playing the game requires a player to have an appropriate
habitus that is suitable to the rules of the game. Johnson (1993) elaborated on this by
stating that a person must have specific skills, talent, and knowledge to be accepted
as a legitimate a player.
The second important concept in Bourdieu’s (1990, 53) theory is habitus, which is
“a system of durable and transposable dispositions.” These dispositions “engender
practices, perceptions, and attitudes that are regular but not necessarily fixed or
invariant” (Meylaerts, 2010, 2). Habitus can be categorized as “social habitus” and
“professional habitus” (Simeoni, 1998, 18). This division of habitus resonates with
how Sela-Sheffy (2005, 14) asserted that “habitus is not merely about professional
expertise, but also accounts for a whole model of a person.” This fine-grained divi-
sion of habitus originated from Bourdieu’s discussion of the concept (Sela-Sheffy,
2005). While Bourdieu sometimes referred to “the habitus of the field,” in other
cases, he discussed personal habitus in terms of “a class person” (Sela-Sheffy, 2005,
14). The “habitus of a field” consists of collective “tendencies, beliefs, skills, all
of which precondition the natural operation of a specific field” (Sela-Sheffy, 2005,
14). In contrast, personal habitus refers to an individual’s mental and physical char-
acteristics as they are developed by early socialization within his/her family, class,
and education (Sela-Sheffy, 2005). Being aware of Bourdieu’s ambiguity, Simeoni
(1998) has helped researchers trace the effects of personal and professional habitus
on the social agent. However, Simeoni (1998) noted that these divisions cannot be
taken for granted; it is better to examine them for each particular case.
The two-dimensional view of habitus initiated by Simeoni (1998) paved the way
for many scholars in the field of translation studies to follow this division in their
sociological analysis of the translator’s social trajectory. For instance, Gouanvic’s
(2005) study in the field of American literature translation in France focused on the
way in which “the very different social trajectories [of translators] determined their
literary tastes when they began to translate” (19). In a similar vein, Hanna’s (2006)
study in the field of drama translation in Egypt showed how early theater translators
were affected by their professional habitus. Other studies in the field highlight
the importance of personal habitus. Meylaerts (2010) study of the socio-linguistic
conflicts in a society revealed the fundamental role of the personal habitus of
individuals, especially in cases in which the “professional translation field is not (or
only weakly) differentiated” (3). Similarly, Shlesinger and Sela-Sheffy highlighted
the significant role of personal habitus in the case of a semi-professional field, such as
interpreting. Focusing on the personal and professional habitus of a translator helps
in understanding the practices he/she applies in the translation. However, Bourdieu

(1990) noted that habitus is only one factor associated with the “production of prac-
tices” (108). According to Gouanvic (2005, 148), “there exists neither internal nor
external dimensions but a concurrence of both.” This relation between habitus, field,
and capital indicates that habitus does not act alone in producing practices. However,
it only makes sense when it is related to the other concepts: field, capital and practice
(Smith, 2020). This kind of relationship was expressed by Bourdieu (1984, 101)
in a formula as: “(habitus) (capital) + field = practice.” This equation indicates
that the practices of an individual result from “relations between one’s dispositions
(habitus) and one’s positions in a field (capital)” within a specific social context (field)
(Maton, 2014, 50). One can construct a comprehensive interpretation of a translator’s
practices only through the interaction of these three sociological concepts.
Capital is another important concept to be defined in this article. Bourdieu (1986)
used capital to describe the things that are universally valued, such as money and
status, which people constantly strive to achieve. He borrowed the concept from
economics and he applied it in the field of sociology as an analytical tool to under-
stand the social and cultural dimensions of human practices. In Bourdieu’s (1977)
view, capital is “all the goods, material or symbolic, without distinction, that present
themselves as rare or worthy of being sought after in a particular social forma-
tion” (178, italics in original). Thus, Bourdieu (1986) elaborated on the meaning of
capital beyond its economic basis to include “monetary and non-monetary, as well
as tangible and intangible forms” (243). Bourdieu’s new understanding of capital in
sociology enabled him to understand the practices of social agents and their struggle
to accumulate both the economic side of capital and non-economic assets. Bourdieu
posited three main types of capital as follows:
Economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be
institutionalized in the forms of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on
certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educa-
tional qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (“connections”),
which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized
in the form of a title of nobility.
(1986, 243, italics in original)
In addition to the previous basic types of capital, there is another type called
symbolic capital, which, according to Bourdieu, is “nothing other than economic or
cultural capital when it is known and recognized.” It is important to tie the concept
of capital to the field. Lareau (2014, 82) noted: “it is not possible to understand truly
what is given currency, what is highly valued and what is not highly valued unless
you understand field. Capital only has meaning in light of field.” It is difficult to
understand the concept of capital alone without situating it within a certain field;
Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, 101, italics in original) asserted that “a capital does
not exist and function except in relation to a field.”
Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capital, Kamil Kı̄lānı̄’s
translation of Gulliver’s Travels (1931) is read against the backdrop of an emerging
field of children’s literature translation in Egypt. This paper examines the field of
children’s literature translation in early twentieth century Egypt by shedding light
on the socio-political factors that contributed to the formation of the field. Attention
is also paid to Kamil Kilānı̄’s (1897–1959) initial and professional habitus, that is,
his early socialization through his education and professional work. A sociological
analysis of his translation of Gulliver’s Travels (1931) at the textual and paratextual
levels will reveal how this translation is influenced by his habitus, capital and the
field in which it was produced. Specifically, his practices as a translator “are not to
be reduced to either habitus or a field … but grow out of the interrelationship …
between habitus, field and capital” (Swartz, 1997, 141–42). The following section
presents an overview of the genesis of the field of children’s literature translation in
Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It will shed light on
the main socio-political factors that conditioned the field during that time period. It
will also outline the main types of capitals available for the social agents at that time.
Genesis of the Field of children’s Literature Translation

in Egypt During the Nineteenth and the Early Twentieth
Centuries
Translation was a major, if not the only, factor causing the formation of the field
of children’s literature in Egypt. The genesis of this field is grounded in a series of
sporadic attempts to introduce suitable literature to the Egyptian child. These attempts
began with translations and adaptations of foreign literature, mainly from French
and English literary works, by scholars who had returned from their scholarships
(Snir, 2017). Early interest in children’s literature dates back to 1870, when Rifā
‘a al-T.aht.āwı̄ (1801–1873) published his book [The Trusted
Guide to the Education of Girls and Boys] (Alqudsi, 1988). Many critics classified
al-T.aht.āwı̄’s book as a book about children’s development and education (Alqudsi,
1988). This is because al-T.aht.āwı̄ introduced this book as part of the educational
curriculum when he was appointed as a Minister of Education in Egypt. He was
asked by H.usayn Kamel Pasha, the supervisor of Egyptian schools at that time, to
write a guide for teachers about how to teach boys and girls (al-T.aht.āwı̄,1 2012).
However, it is possible to mark the date of the book’s publication, 1870, as the
beginning of what could be called as children’s literature in Egypt. It could be said
that al-T.aht.āwı̄ made the first attempts to set the boundaries of the field of children’s
literature translation.
al-T.aht.āwı̄’s publication of a book about children’s literature in the field of educa-
tion suggested the existence of a homology between these two fields, in which we can
consider the field of education as the field of power. This early practice in the field
influenced the practices of the social agents who later joined the field of children’s
literature translation by adjusting their cultural products to make them suitable for
1 al-T.aht.āwı̄’s book [The Trusted Guide to the Education of Girls and

Boys] was published in 1870 but because it is difficult to obtain this old edition. I depend here on
the latest edition which was re-published in 2012.
the educational curriculum. The homology of these two fields can be attributed to
many reasons. First, Alqudsi (1988) explained that the scarcity of children’s litera-
ture outside the field of education was related to publishers who were worried about
investing in children’s literature. The insecurity of the publishers came from the fact
that “the market [of this field as a separate or autonomous field in its own] is so
limited, good authors and illustrators, if available, are reluctant to commit to chil-
dren’s books due to the lack of financial returns and appreciation” (Alqudsi, 1988,
12). From a sociological perspective, it seems that the field of children’s literature
translation lacks economic capital in its genesis.
Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) explained that the limits of any social field of
activity are determined by the capital available for participants in that field. Different
forms of capital encourage participants to enter into and compete in a field (Bourdieu,
1986). Forms of capital give the game a subjective sense and make it worth playing
(Bourdieu, 1986). In addition to the lack of economic capital in the genesis of the
field of children’s literature translation, as has been previously mentioned, it seems
that there is also a lack of symbolic capital. This was a result of the underrating of
any writer or translator who attempted to write or translate for children. Many critics
underrated anyone who joined the field of children’s literature describing them off
lacking in intellectual ability. Zakı̄ Mūbārk asserted that “no one was interested in
children’s literature [in its genesis] except those who had nothing to introduce for
adults … writing in this field indicated the absence of talent for writing in the field
of traditional literature” (cited in ‘Abd al-Qādir, 2013, 95, my translation). For this
reason, no one was enthusiastic to join the field during this period. Mūbārk also noted
that writers and translators produced with limited confidence and tried to hide their
writing from peers. For instance, Kāmil Kı̄lānı̄ did not tell his friend Naguib Mahfouz
that he was writing stories for children because he was afraid of being underrated
(‘Abd al-Qādir, 2013). Therefore, when writers and translators attempted to produce
literature for children outside the field of education, they often wrote or translated
using a pseudonym. For example, Ah.mad Shawqı̄ (1868–1932) published the story
The Rooster and the Fox before publishing his poetry collection Alshawqiyāt in
the Al-Ahrām newspaper on 28 November 1892, using the pseudonym Nājı̄ al-K.urs
(‘Abd al-Qādir, 2013).
For agents to function in any field of cultural production, they must be aware of
the value of the capital at stake. This entails developing “an interest” in the stakes
or what Bourdieu called “illusio” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, 116–117). Since no
one enters the field intending to lose, the entrants to the field of children’s literature
translation in the late nineteenth century made it clear in their paratextual zone that
what they translated for children was suitable to be included under the category
of education. Instances of these practices can be found in Muh.ammad ᶜUthmān
Jalāl’s (1829–1898) epilogue to his translation of La Fontaine’s Fables into Arabic
as [The Insightful Wisdom of Fables and Proverbs] (1906, 209)
as follows:
Everything said about animals is intended to teach human beings

Incidents of time are narrated in wisdom glitters as gold
The darkness of the night of ignorance has been moon-lit by every easy and smooth sentence
Under the Khedive’s reign our Egypt’s Khedive Abbas
[This book] may be better implanted in schools because it is the best plantations (my translation)
Jalāl’s concluding poetic lines imply that the text was translated for children to
teach them morals and good lessons in hope that it may appeal to the adults who can
publish it to pupils in schools. It can be safely claimed that the homology of the field
of children’s literature with the field of education guaranteed economic success for
the social agents who joined the field in its genesis. It is possible, therefore, to assume
that the slow and sporadic publication of a small number of translations introduced
to children was a result of a lack of economic capital. This also explains why the
number of translations during this time was small. It was not until sixty years later that
the field of children’s literature translation began to receive considerable attention.
There was an increasing interest in the field of children’s literature translation in
Egypt after its independence. The Unilateral Declaration of Egyptian Independence
in 1922 was one of the main socio-political factors that reconfigured the structure
of the available positions in the field of children’s literature translation. Egyptian
intellectuals, reformers, and nationalists were searching for an identity for Egypt in
the face of intensifying Western imperialism (Morrison, 2015). As part of this search,
they focused on the literature and education of children (Morrison, 2015). Egyptian
intellectuals and nationalists wanted the next generation “to be as strong as their
occupiers, yet remain authentically Egyptian” (Morrison, 2015, 20). This interest in
the field gave it a new form of capital (a symbolic one) which had not existed before.
It can be argued then that the field of children’s literature translation began to
develop with the independence of Egypt in 1922. New themes, new genres, new
members, new practices, and a fresh understanding of what was at stake in the field
started to emerge. New institutions for children, such as the children’s press and
various social welfare programs began to appear (Morrison, 2015). Against this
background, the following section will focus on how Kāmil Kı̄lānı̄’s personal and
professional habitus are affected by the socio-political factors of the field during that
time and how in return these influences are manifest in his translation of Gulliver’s
Travels. In order to cast the analytical searchlight as broadly as possible, the following
section also examines the types of capital that Kı̄lānı̄ accumulated through his social
trajectory and how he succeeded in investing in this capital not only by identifying
himself as a pioneer in the field but also by bringing new forms of capitals in the
field of children’s literature translation during that time.
Personal and Professional Habitus of Kāmil Kı̄lānı̄

(1897–1959)
The role played by Kı̄lānı̄ in expanding the field of Arabic children’s literature
in Egypt during the early twentieth century cannot be overlooked. Understanding
Kı̄lānı̄’s practices in the translation of Gulliver’s Travels may benefit from in-depth
research into his personal and professional habitus.
Kilānı̄’s personal habitus was formed from his early childhood. He was surrounded
by people who nurtured his mind and fueled his imagination, namely his father, his
uncle, the Greek governess who worked in his house, a coachman, and the sweet
seller in his district (Badawı̄, 1999). Kilānı̄ was born to a prominent engineer father
who owned a large library full of scientific and mathematical books (Badawı̄, 1999).
He acknowledged that his father was “a brilliant mathematician” whose library
contributed in his knowledge (Badawı̄, 1999, 28). Kilānı̄’s uncle narrated bedtime
stories to him and encouraged him to memorize poems (Badawı̄, 1999). Similarly,
the Greek governess, who worked in Kilānı̄’s house while he was a child, narrated
Greek legends and stories to him before he fell asleep.
The people who contributed in structuring Kilānı̄’s habitus were not confined to
his house only; the coachman and the sweet seller in Kilānı̄’s neighborhood cultivated
his literary dispositions too. Kilānı̄ acknowledged that the first time he heard the story
of Sayf Ibn dhı̄ Yazan2 was through the coachman (Badawı̄, 1999). He was further
influenced by Mus.t.afa al-H.albı̄ who sold “basbūs-a,” which is a popular dessert in
Egypt; al-H.albi had memorized the poetry of Abd al-Ġanı̄ al-Nabulsı̄, who was an
eminent Sunni Muslim scholar and Sufi (Badawı̄, 1999). He was also inspired by
a rababa3 poet called ‘Abdū Alshā’ir (Alshā’ir meaning, literally, “the poet”), who
narrated folk-heroic epics. He regularly attended nightly events held by the poet and
listened to him reciting poems (Badawı̄, 1999). Indeed, Kilānı̄ himself notes that
listening to Arabic stories, Greek myths, and the adventures of heroes from rababa
poetry expanded his literary and linguistic repertoire (Badawı̄, 1999).
One of the main dispositions of Kilānı̄’s personal habitus was criticism. He had
developed a critical eye since the age of seven. He became critical of Egyptian
children’s book, comparing them to Western’s books for children. He reported to
his friend Sayyid Ibrāhı̄m that the national books did not motivate children to read
(Badawı̄, 1999). Because his friend challenged him to write similar book, he started
writing his first story, Prince Safwān. This story was rejected by the publisher due to
Kilānı̄’s young age (Badawı̄, 1999). This critical persona was internalized in Kilānı̄’s
habitus and its influences appeared in his translation, as will be shown later. Kilānı̄
started writing critical articles published under the pseudonym “K. K” until he gained
2 An Arabic folklore epic, which involves a lot of action and events.

3 The rababa “is a traditional stringed instrument, which was the instrument of choice for the
traveling performers who specialized in recounting traditional tales (in colloquial Egyptian) about
historic and mythological characters, like al-Zahir Baybars, Abu Zayd al-Hilali, Antar ibn Shadad,
etc.” (Fahmy 2007, 80).
fame (Badawı̄, 1999). These factors left a heavy imprint on the structuring of Kilānı̄’s
personal habitus.
Kilānı̄ studied at the Egyptian university, known today as Cairo university
(Hashim, 1960). During his time at university, he created a plan for the study of
Arabic, English and French literature as well as philosophy and Islamic history
(Hashim, 1960). He decided to memorize [The Alfiyya of Ibn Malik], a
rhymed book of Arabic grammar, and La Fontaine’s Fables and Al-h.arirı̄, as a way
of learning Eastern and Western literatures (Hashim, 1960). During his summer
vacation, he joined al-Azhar as a learner, and attended classes in Arabic grammar,
morphology and logic (Hashim, 1960). Kilānı̄’s undergraduate studies in the area of
English literature and his learning plan for French and Italian formed his cultural
capital with regard to his translating enterprise. The capital of an individual decides
his/her position in a specific field (Yu & Xu, 2017). The cultural capital that Kilānı̄
accumulated from his education equipped him with the essential language skills and
indispensable qualifications to carry out translation activities both in adult literature
and children’s literature.
It was not only his educational qualifications that contributed to granting Kilānı̄
cultural capital, but he also accumulated cultural capital by publishing different
literary works in the field of adult literature. Kilānı̄ was not only a translator, he was
an author too. He wrote in all kinds of literary genres: poetry, prose, and critical
essays (‘Abū al-Wafā, 1932). He translated and simplified many books in different
languages including English, French, and Italian (‘Abū al-Wafā, 1932). Before he
began writing and translating for children, Kilānı̄ contributed in diverse fields such
as fiction translation, history, journalism, and poetry (‘Abū al-Wafā, 1932).
In 1920, Kilānı̄ began hosting a literary salon that held every Saturday at his
home. Between 1929 and1932, he was part of a short lived, pan-Arab literary club
named [The Arabic Literature Association] that included many promi-
nent figures in the Arabic literary field such as Ah.mad Shawqı̄ (1886–1933), Khalı̄l
Mut.rān (1872–1949), and Samih. al-Khālidı̄ as members (Al-Jindı̄, 1961). It could be
assumed that his cultural capital contributes in increasing his symbolic capital which
consequently led to his reputation as one of the most acclaimed translators in the field
of children’s literature translation. Addison (2016, 8) highlighted the importance for
a person to know the symbolic value of his/ her capital and use it properly in game-
playing “to develop competitive strategies.” Kilānı̄ succeeded in making use of his
cultural/ social and symbolic capitals which he accumulated across different fields.
Addison (2016, 8) asserted that besides economic capital, cultural and social forms
of capitals are “extremely useful in securing an advantage and dominant position in
the game.” In Bourdieu’s terms, it could be said that Kilānı̄’s habitus is well aligned
with the “rules of the game” of the field of children’s literature translation in Egypt
during the early twentieth century. In addition to that, Kilānı̄ succeeded in investing
of his capitals in the field of children’s literature translation. The following section
will explain how this interwoven relation between the field, the habitus of the trans-
lator and his capital manifested itself in the translation of Gulliver’s Travels at the
textual and paratextual levels.
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as Mediated by Kamil

Kilānı̄’s (1897–1959)
The Textual Level
The analysis at the textual and paratextual levels helps in drawing tentative conclu-
sions about the linguistic and stylistic choices of the translator. It will also aid in
understanding the extent to which these choices reflect the interwoven relationship
between Kı̄lānı̄’s personal and professional habitus and the structure of the field
as well as his capital. The analysis focuses on the way in which the translation of
Gulliver’s Travels is mediated by Kilānı̄ through a sociological reading of the trans-
lation within its historical and socio-cultural context. The analysis sheds light on
three main areas: the translator’s stance toward the Arabic language, the influences
of Kı̄lānı̄’s profession as a teacher on his translation, and the Islamization of the text.
As for the translator’s stance toward language, as previously mentioned, Kı̄lānı̄
was born and brought up during a time when Egypt was subject to colonization by
different Western countries. The period during which Kı̄lānı̄ published his translation
of Gulliver’s Travels (1931) falls under the time when Egypt was struggling to shape
its national identity. As for Kı̄lānı̄’s linguistic habitus, it is important to highlight that
he was a conscious and ardent supporter of Modern Standard Arabic. He excreted
every effort in introducing an Arabic language free of Western influences. He was
keen to remove all traces of foreignness. This strategy is enacted at more than one
level. Firstly, he removes any foreign-sounding words and substitutes them with
Arabic ones. The following are some examples.
Example 16.1 Swift depicts the people of Lilliput as speaking a very obscure
language, and although other translations often attempt to transliterate these complex
words into Arabic, Kilānı̄ avoids these foreign words completely. This can be seen
in the following example:
ST:
[he] cried out in a shrill, but distinct voice, ‘Hekinab dagul’ (Swift, 1909, 4).
TT:
Kilānı̄ (2002a,4 12)
BT:
he uttered a sentence that I couldn’t understand.
4Kilānı̄’s translation of Gulliver’s Travels was originally published in 1931 (Kilānı̄ 1947). However,
because it is difficult to obtain the original edition, I depend here on the most recent edition which
was republished in 2002 and it is available online.
Kilānı̄ also transliterates the foreign names of characters, ships, and institutions
into Arabic. Al-Direeni (1993, 50) criticized Kilānı̄’s omission of the names of the
ships and shipmasters in all the four voyages. However, reading the translator’s
strategies within the sociological context, it is possible to understand that Kı̄lānı̄,
like many other Egyptians, during the time at which this translation was produced,
wanted to revive the Arabic language away from Western linguistic influences.
Example 16.2
ST:
I accepted an advantageous offer from Captain William Prichard, Master of the
Antelope (Swift, 1909, 2).
TT:
Kilānı̄ (2002a, 9)
BT:
I was forced by necessity to sail in another ship.
Kı̄lānı̄’s professional habitus as a teacher exerts an overwhelming power over his
translation practices. When Kı̄lānı̄, the teacher, adopts the role of a translator, his
professional habitus interferes, as demonstrated at the paratextual and textual levels.
At the paratextual level, a pertinent example here is the biography of Jonathan Swift
covering five pages (124–128) which is attached at the end of the first volume. Kı̄lānı̄
(2002a, 124) adds a footnote in which he writes:
TT:
BT:
I inserted this biography as a guide for teachers so that they can understand basic
information about the author of the source text.
At the textual level, Kı̄lānı̄ allows himself much freedom in translating Swift’s
text, making radical changes in many parts of the ST by means of additions. It can
be assumed that these additions reflect the utopia that Kilānı̄ wants to see in the
Egyptian educational system. Al-Direeni (1993, 52) comments on these additions:
These amplifications were inserted [by Kilānı̄] in which he presents his own views, thoughts
and opinions about general important topics. When he gets any chance, he crams his own
added and amplified paragraphs within the original paragraphs to make them look like parts
of the source text.
In the first volume entitled [Gulliver in the land of dwarves,] Kilānı̄

adds four lengthy sections covering eight pages. These are entitled as follows:
1. [Methods of education] (2002a, 87–88)

2. [Love of the Truth] (2002a, 89)
3. [The Study of History and Philosophy] (2002a, 89–92)
4. [Rules and opinions] (2002a, 92–94)
Under the section entitled [methods of education], Kilānı̄ narrates how
the dwarves choose well-qualified teachers for their children. He also describes their
educational curriculum as beneficial for the intellectual growth of their children. One
pertinent example expresses Kilānı̄’s view of ideal teachers. Kı̄lānı̄ portrays that the
ideal teachers do not teach children morphology and syntax—a view he expresses in
the TT as follows (2002a, 88):
Example 16.3
TT:
BT:
[Teachers] do not teach archaic languages to children, and do not bother them with
morphology and syntax.
An article by Yusuf al-Shārūnı̄ which was published in Al-Rı̄sala magazine in 1957
appears to support the assumption noted earlier of the relation between Kilānı̄’s addi-
tions and his own views (al-Shārūnı̄, 1961). al-Shārūnı̄ writes that during an interview
with Kilānı̄, the latter explained his complaint that teachers of the Arabic language
teach complex literary texts to students, asking them to analyze sentences syntacti-
cally and morphologically (al-Shārūnı̄, 1961). Kilānı̄ compares learning syntax and
morphology to learning anatomy and science at a college of medicine, and suggests
that these two subjects should be taught at colleges and universities and not in elemen-
tary or secondary schools (al-Shārūnı̄, 1961). Under the section [The
study of history and philosophy], Kilānı̄ writes (2002a, 89):
Example 16.4
TT:
BT:
As for their way of studying history, it is different from what we had in our schools.
Again, this example shows the influence of Kilānı̄’s profession as a teacher in
which he recommends through his translation a utopian way of studying history in
schools. The entitled section [Rules and opinions] reflects another aspect of
the influence of Kilānı̄’s profession on his translation. The use of corporal punishment
was a pertinent issue during the time Kilānı̄ published this translation in 1931 in
Egypt. At that period, students were beaten in schools and the punishments meted
out by teachers were cruel (S.aleh., 1966). The stick had become a symbol of a teacher’s
power in the classroom in Egypt (Cribiore, 2005). The following example reflects
Kilānı̄’s view of this kind of punishment (2002a, 93–94):
Example 16.5
TT:
BT:
Corporal punishment is forbidden. If students need to be punished, teachers ban them
from attending two or three lessons, and this is the best punishment. Teachers do not
beat students at all or blame them, because they are aware of the negative effects of
this act on students’ lives.
The third stage in which Kilānı̄ mediates Swift’s text appears in the Islamization
of the text. On one hand, this practice on the part of the translator is influenced by
his personal habitus. Kilānı̄ was raised in an Islamic environment. He memorized
the Qur’an when in primary school (Badawı̄, 1999). His use of Qur’anic verses is
significant in all of his translations and writings, not only in this case study under
analysis. There are twenty-three instances of intertextuality with the Quranic verses in
the translation of the four voyages of Gulliver’s Travels. On the other hand, Kilānı̄’s
didactic and pedagogical writing style was acquired from the profession he was
engaged with; teaching. Didacticism is also a characteristic of the field of children’s
literature generally in the Arab world (Mdallel, 2004). In Bourdieu’s terms, it is
one of “the rules of the game.” It is important to mention here that the habitus of
the translator is interwoven with the structure of the field of children’s literature
translation. The habitus of the translator is well aligned with the “rules of the game”
of the field of children’s literature translation in Egypt during the early twentieth
century.
Kilānı̄ Islamizes the TT using two main strategies: deletions and additions. Kilānı̄
Islamizes the TT using two main strategies: deletions and additions. Al- Direeni
comments (1993, 53):
Gulliver who speaks in Kilānı̄’s version is an optimistic person who had the traits of
an Arab, Muslim character. This can be discerned from the linguistic choices which reflect
Gulliver’s ideology and thinking.
Kilānı̄ omits events that are considered taboo in Islam and in Egyptian culture,
and/or that were unacceptable in the field of children’s literature generally at the
time. The deletion of references to Gulliver’s love affair in Chapter Six were made
mainly to comply with the moral constraints of children’s literature at the time.
Other translators have also deleted this scene because it “violates the taboo on
sexual activity in children’s literature … [this event] disappears from translations
for children; it is unnecessary and thus can be easily omitted” (Shavit, 2005, 123).
In some instances, Kilānı̄ adds Quranic intertextuality and Islamic values. Take
for example, the passage in which Swift describes the circumstances Gulliver finds
himself in after the shipwreck:
Example 16.6
ST:
I swam as fortune directed me, and was pushed forward by wind and tide (Swift,
1909, 2).
This has been translated by Kilānı̄ (2002a, 10) as follows:
TT:
BT:
I swam blindly but whenever I felt disappointed, I reminded myself with patience
and hope. When I lost control and could not move anymore, I entrusted my affairs
to Allah.
The underlined sentence added by Kilāni draws on a Quranic verse (44) taken
from Sūrat Ghāfir [I commit my case to God] (translated by Abdel
Haleem, 2005, 304). Another addition made by Kilānı̄ is in the fourth volume when
he describes the facial features of the giants. Although Swift attempts in the ST to
show them as very ugly, Kilānı̄ (2002b, 61) concludes their description with the
following added sentence:
Example 16.7
TT:
BT:
There is no ugly creature on earth because everything was created by a great Creator
who creates the universe and creates man in the finest state.
The previous example shows that the translator endeavors to Islamize Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels. Kilānı̄ takes a whole verse from the Quran as it is “[He] creates
man in the finest state” and weaves it into the narrative smoothly. The clause is taken
from verse 4 of Sūrat Al-Tin. Al-Direeni (1993) comments on this added section,
that Gulliver in Swift’s version is a character who wants to portray human beings
as the ugliest creatures on earth; he does not look for any opportunity to glorify
the Creator who creates a man in the finest state. One reason for the translator’s
intervention and his concluding sentence is that the addressees of his translation are
Arab children in an Islamic country. The translator does not want to mock the facial
features of the giants because this act contradicts Islamic values and principles. Allah
warns Muslims not to mock at each other, saying in the Holy Quran:
[Believers, no one group of men
should jeer at another, who may after all be better than them; no one group of women
should jeer at another, who may after all be better than them] (translated by Abdel
Haleem 2005, 339).
Kilānı̄’s practices, as shown above, embody the interaction of his individual struc-
tured habitus and the structure of the field of children’s literature translation. The
translation of Gulliver’s Travels corresponds with the historical period in the early
twentieth century during which the field of children’s literature translation needed
agents to establish its norms and draw its boundaries. Kilānı̄ succeeded in acquiring
a prominent position in the field not only through the variety of genres and themes he
introduced for Egyptian children, but also through legitimizing the field by speaking
about the social recognition he received from those in power. In Bourdieu’s terms, the
amount of the cultural capital with which Kilānı̄ entered the field endowed him with
a kind of symbolic capital that made his name prominent in the field of children’s
literature translation in the Arab world. The following section attempts to briefly shed
light on how Kilānı̄ invests in his cultural and symbolic capital in the field through
an analysis of the paratextual elements of his translation of Gulliver’s Travels.
The Paratextual Level
In line with Bourdieu’s concept of capital, this section attempts to read Kı̄lānı̄’s
practices at the paratextual level sociologically. Elgindy (2013, 206) noted the effec-
tiveness of Bourdieu’s forms of capital in analyzing “the values attached to the
paratextual elements.” Paratext is defined as those things in a published work that
accompany the text, including the cover presentation and layout, the author’s name,
the preface, the post-face, and illustrations, which have either a positive or negative
impact on the reading (Boutrig, 2012). The investment of a capital is “actualized
through, and exhausted within the paratextual zone” (Elgindy, 2013, 206).
The field of children’s literature translation in Egypt during the early twentieth
century was not well defined, regulated, and institutionalized. Since there was very
little or even no economic capital at stake in the field of children’s literature translation
when Kāmil Kı̄lānı̄ joined the field, Kı̄lānı̄ succeeded in accumulating another form
of capital, that is symbolic capital and a kind of prestige through his cultural products
which included translation, adaptation and writing. The efforts of Kı̄lānı̄ in the field
of children’s literature were the results of his own passion to legitimize the field,
which had suffered from a long period of marginality and low status. The following
sections shed light on three elements of the paratextual level:
– List of publication of his cultural products
– Opinions of the most prominent names in the field of education (Ministers of
Education)
– Kilānı̄’s literary productions
Fig. 16.2 The blurb of the first and the third volume
Figure 16.2 shows the blurb of the first and the third volumes which feature
Kilānı̄’s literary productions.
The previous figure shows nine categories of Kilānı̄’s literary productions: Comic
Stories, Indian Stories, Arabic Stories, and Stories from The Arabian Nights, Scien-
tific Stories, The most Famous Stories, Stories for Acting, Myths of The World,
Shakespeare’s Stories. The symbolic capital of Gulliver’s Travels in its source culture
and that of its writer explain why Kilānı̄ chooses it and groups it under the heading
[The Most Famous Stories]. The category of [The Most Famous
Stories] includes the translations of Gulliver’s Travels, each voyage being dealt with
in a separate volume, and the translation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Kilānı̄’s
literary productions, as the blurb shows, consist of a combination of works trans-
lated from different cultures, catering for the interests of children of different age
groups from early years until the last stage of childhood. The diversification of the
items listed adds a symbolic value, which accordingly leads to economic gain. Ali
(2018, 98) pointed out that this kind of listing of the publications of the translator
only serves as a means of promoting his/her cultural capital but it also functions
as “a marketing tool designed to invite the reader to consider the acquisition of the
Fig. 16.3 Last page of the third volume
translator’s other works.” This list of publications, as Ali noted, invites the reader
to construct “an image of the translator as an author and as an active social agent”
in the field (Ali, 2018, 98). Kilānı̄ not only lists his literary productions, but he also
attaches the positive reviews from authoritative figures in Egypt during the sixties
regarding his productions in the third volume of his translation. Figure 16.3 shows
the paratext which is attached to the translation.
The previous paratextual page features nine reviews by reputable political author-
ities in Egypt such as Ah.mad Lut.fı̄ al-Sayyied,5 Ah.mad Naguib al-Hilālı̄,6 Ja‘afār
5 Ahmad Lutfı̄ al-Sayyied (1872–1963) served as a professor and later as the rector of the Egyptian
. .
(Cairo) university (Esposito, 1998).
6 Ahmad Naguib Al-Hilālı̄ (1891–1958) was a prime minister of Egypt from March 1 till June 29,
.
1952 (Lentz, 2014). In 1934, he became Minister of Education in the government of Muhammad
Tawfiq Nessim (Lentz, 2014). In 1937, he again named Minister of Education in the government of
Mustafa el-Nahas (Lentz, 2014).
Wallı̄ Pasha,7 Ali Maher Pasha,8 Muh.ammad al-‘ashmāwı̄,9 Muh.ammad Bahi

Al-Deen Barkāt,10 Muh.ammad Tāwfiq Raf’at Pasha,11 Muh.ammad H.elmı̄ ᶜEissa
Pasha,12 Muh.ammad Ali ᶜAlūba.13 Such favorable comments function as conse-
crating frames for Kı̄lānı̄’s translation. The reviews introduce Kı̄lānı̄ as a credible
translator and author with a unique and elegant style, which enable him to acquire
enough symbolic capital. Put differently, these reviews not only establish Kı̄lānı̄’s
symbolic capital but also his “embodied cultural capital,” exemplified by his style
of translation and the level of Modern Standard Arabic he uses. These reviews posi-
tively affect the readers’ perception of the translations. As Bourdieu noted, “the
authorized point of view may come from a great critic or prestigious preface-writer
or established author.” Ali (2018, 98) pointed out that the position of reviews as an
epilogue in a translated work is used to “credit the translator and assert his overall
contribution to the field.” The reviews bring to the fore Kı̄lānı̄’s symbolic capital,
which successfully leads to economic capital, and spotlight his embodied cultural
capital too. Further enhancing the above reviews attached to the third volume of the
translation, the fourth volume contains other anonymous reviews of Kı̄lānı̄’s literary
productions as shown in Fig. 16.4.
These elements of the paratext attached to Kı̄lānı̄’s translations of Gulliver’s
Travels show how Kı̄lānı̄ plays the game well to secure readers, sales and esteem.
Conclusion
Kilānı̄’s translation of Gulliver’s Travels is significantly different to the ST. It shows

Gulliver as an optimistic Muslim, Arab person. Many of Gulliver’s views reflect those
of the translator and the whole text is to a large extent influenced by the personal
and professional habitus of the translator. It can be concluded that the translation is
not done by Kamil Kilānı̄ as a translator, but also by Kilānı̄ as a critic, teacher, and
reformer.
7 Ja‘afār Wallı̄ Pasha (1880–1963) was a minister in the Ministry of Awqāf in 1919 (Badrawi 2012).
In 1922, he became Minister of Education (Badrawi 2012).
8 Ali Maher Pasha (1883–1960) was Prime Minister of Egypt from January 27 till March 1, 1952
(Lentz, 2014). He was named Minister of Education in 1925 and served in this position for a year
(Lentz, 2014).
9 Muhammad Al-‘ashmāwı̄ was a minister in the Ministry of education, though no specific date has
.
been found, when he held this position (Mūbark, 2011).
10 Muhammad Bahi Al-Deen Barkāt was a minster of the Ministry of education in Egypt though
.
no specific date has been found, when he held this position (H.usayn, 2013).
11 Muhammad Tāwfiq Raf’at Pasha (1886–1944) was a minister in the Ministry of Education in
.
1920 (al-Jaborı̄ 2003). He became the head of Arabic Language Academy in 1934 (al-Jaborı̄ 2003).
12 Muhammad Helmı̄ ᶜEissa Pasha (1883–1953) was a minister in the Ministry of Awqāf for a year
. .
(Rizk 2003). In 1931, he became Minister of Education for a year and half (Rizk 2003).
13 Muhammad Ali ᶜAlūba (1875–1956) was Minister of Education in Egypt (Safwa 2018).
.
Fig. 16.4 Last page of the fourth volume
Kilānı̄ is also classified as the pioneer in the field of children’s literature in the Arab
world. His entrance into the field coincided with changing concepts about childhood
in Egypt due to changing socio-political factors. Thus, he invested in his symbolic and
cultural capital in legitimizing the field and setting its boundaries as has been shown
in the analysis at the paratextual level. His translation also embodies the dynamic
relationship between his subjective structured habitus and the objective structures
of the field in which he was actively involved. Bourdieu’s sociological concepts of
field, habitus, and capital are highly interdependent and as the case under analysis
shows, each depends on the other to function coherently in the social space. Overall,
the translation of Gulliver’s Travels shows the influences of Kilānı̄’s personal and
professional habitus and reveals his investment in cultural and symbolic capital to
legitimize the field of children’s literature translation in Egypt.
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Chapter 17
Identity Politics and Education in Select
Native Canadian Autobiographies
Kodhandaraman Chinnathambi
Abstract Education, an important colonial apparatus across the globe, had a unique
function among Indigenous People of Canada. The arrival of Christian missionaries
in the seventeenth century marks the beginning of European education in the colonial
Canadian context. As part of the civilizing and Christianising mission, Indigenous
People of Canada were introduced to modern Christian education by the colonial
government. Such an exposure to modern education created heterogeneous Native
voices rather than the homogeneous one that was intended. It is against this back-
drop that this paper examines (a) the factors that contributed to this heterogeneity,
(b) the significance of these Native heterogeneous voices in contesting the claims of
postcolonialism in Canada, and (c) the role of education in creating tension between
Indigenous People and non-Indigenous People in the representation of Native iden-
tity, and in negotiating a space for such representation. The paper seeks to offer a
critical examination of six Native Autobiographies; Eleanor Brass—I walk in two
worlds (IWTW), James Sewid—Guests Never Leave Hungry (GNLH), Basil H.
Johnston—Indian School Days (IO), Rita Joe—Song of Rita Joe (SRJ), Rudy Wiebe
and Yvonne Johnson—Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (JCW), and James
Tyman—Inside Out—An Autobiography of a Native Canadian (IO) —with a view to
highlighting the function of education in the Native Canadian context; and, in doing
so, to contest attempts to homogenize the Native identity in Postcolonial Studies.
Keywords Education · Identity · Representation · Autobiography · Christian

missionary · Postcolonialism
Introduction
The arrival of Recollects, Jesuits, and Ursulines in the early 1600s in New France
marks the beginning of European education in the region. The focus of this educa-
tion was to “civilize” and “Christianize” native people. Later, in the late 1700s
K. Chinnathambi (B)
University of Technology and Applied Sciences-Ibra, Ibra, Oman
e-mail: ckodhandaraman@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_17
258 K. Chinnathambi
and early 1800s, the Protestant churches also began to participate in this civilizing
and Christianizing mission through native education in the territory now known
as Canada (McCue). They taught native children Christian doctrine, basic literacy,
and numeracy. The colonial government did not interfere with the activities of the
church. The church, for its part, received neither funds nor directions from the colo-
nial government regarding native education. Colonial governments of those times did
not concern themselves with the formal education of the native youth. It was only
after the 1830s that the colonial government began to donate money to church organi-
zations, leading to the setting up of mission schools in pre-reserve native settlements.
This funding commenced after the responsibility for administering the colonies was
transferred from the military to a Secretary of State (McCue). The government’s
policy ensured that the system of Church-State run residential schools was the central
element in the ongoing effort to assimilate the native population. This backdrop
provided opportunities for many researchers to carry out research into aspects of
Native literature. The problem with most of the research was that they applied a post-
colonial theoretical framework to Native literature and represented Indigenous People
and their identity from this pre-conceived perspective; that is, either as out-and-out
victim or as having complete agency for resistance. These frameworks assumed the
arrival of Europeans as the commencement point for their studies. This was a purely
synchronic approach, as put forward by postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said,
Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. Edward Said’s “Orientalism” (1979) postulates
a victim position for the native; Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1995) empha-
sizes a voiceless position, Homi Bhabha’s “The Location of Culture” (1994) studies
the hybrid nature of culture and identity. It is evident from their positioning that they
viewed the colonized as being devoid of agency to mount any resistance. However,
Bill Ashcroft in his Post-Colonial Transformation (2001) suggests that a complete
agency for transformation does indeed exist among the colonized, but he does not
provide details about the “how” and “what” of this agency. Despite the seeming
discrepancy in the approach of Ashcroft, there exists a striking similarity among
the four in terms of the ambit of their positions: that is, either complete agency or
none. In effect, therefore, Postcolonial studies in general have employed a synchronic
approach to study events, whereas the Indigenous People of Canada represent their
identity via a diachronic approach. Here, Synchronic means a periodization that
studies Native identity from postcolonial perspective and places native identity in
opposition to colonialism. Such approach, in a way, shrinks native identity to one
specific time period—colonialism. Consequently, it does not encompass the entire
ambit of pre-contact, contact, and postcontact eras. The diachronic approach that
King advocates implies the development and evolution of Native identity through
different time periods, wherein colonialism is merely a small distortion in the history
of Native identity. Hence there is a divide between the ways in which Indigenous
People and non-Natives represent the identity of Native Canadians. Although there
have been many research studies on Native Canadian culture and literature, very few
deal with Education and Native identity with a focus on the diachronic approach that
the Indigenous People themselves take. This paper is therefore an important step
forward in shining a new light on the true nature of Canadian Native identity.
17 Identity Politics and Education in Select Native … 259
Interpreting Residential Schools
Researchers and historians largely agree that residential schools were an important
colonial tool to disintegrate native socio-economic structure and assimilate Indige-
nous People into mainstream Canadian culture. Also, they consider that residential
schools were places for cultural genocide. The past few decades have brought the role
of residential schools back into the limelight. “Since the late 1980s many residential
school survivors have come forward with stories of their experiences” (“Historical
Sketch”) through testimonies and autobiographies.
J.S. Milloy’s Suffer the Little Children: A history of Native Residential Schools in
Canada (1996), also critiques the residential school system. Milloy points out residen-
tial schools’ negative elements and its consequences on native people. Commenting
on Milloy’s work, Trevithick writes: “in his sensitivity to the negative elements of the
residential school experience and criticisms of the government, he surpasses Miller...
he contrasts DIA’s intentions to create a ‘homelike’ and ‘caring’ atmosphere in the
schools, with the antithetic reality” (Trevithick 59). According to Milloy, “even the
basic premise of resocialization was violent” so that the rhetorical aim “to kill the
Indian in the child... took on a sharp traumatic reality in the life of each child—
separated from parents and community, often at the tender age of six, and isolated
in a threatening world hostile to identity, traditional ritual and language” (59). He
also gives the government’s humanitarian rhetoric the most credence by stating that
the policy makers’ intentions were good and that the government’s policy of civi-
lizing indigenous Canadians was a national duty (53). Milloy’s study presents, as
Trevithick highlights humanitarian aspects in policy, assimilative intention of the
policy and education as a means for social control. However, he misses out the gap
between actual function of this apparatus and the intention, policy, with which it was
deployed.
The historian Haig-Brown, in her Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian
Residential School (1988) “calls residential schools an intentional genocide... and
the purpose of the schools was to eliminate Indigenous languages and cultures from
the schools” (Foster 3). She uses both the archival records and testimonies from
former students to bolster her argument. Foster points out that both Miller and Haig-
Brown admit that “residential schools were a form of cultural invasion and a way for
the Canadian government to control Indigenous communities” (3). Trevithick points
out that Haig-Brown is one of the commentators who highlight the role of native
resistance and its effectiveness. He describes Haig-Brown’s findings as showing
“the existence of numerous forms of resistance, a shared mentality on the part of
the children and a high degree of sophistication and ingenuity” (Trevithick 72).
Haig-Brown asserts that “Even with the controls... well in place, the students found
time and space to express themselves and to produce a separate culture of their own
within the school” (73). She attempts to evaluate both the damage done to native
students and the resistance shown by them at residential schools. However, she does
not identify the aspects that constitute the differences among Indigenous People and
the link between identity and differences.
260 K. Chinnathambi
In his Native Residential Schooling in Canada: A Review of Literature, Scott

Trevithick points out the contradictions, discrepancies, and differences of opinion
among authors and between works with regard to residential schools. He highlights
two opposing perspectives on residential schools—the traditional view and the revi-
sionist view (52). The traditional view holds that “the government’s policy was one
of assimilation through Christianization and education” (52). Trevithick here draws
attention to the fact that there is a mix of self-serving and humanitarian motives in
this policy. He explains the self-serving motives as “government’s desire to rid itself
of its moral, economic and legal obligation to Natives and to “free up” the large
tracts of land reserved for the Natives” (52). He describes the humanitarian motives
as the “wish to avoid the costly and brutal subjugation of Indigenous People through
military means, the wish to save a supposedly dying “race” still in its “civilizational
infancy” and to “raise it” up and bestow upon it the innumerable advantages of British
civilization” (52). He also states that “the traditional accounts emphasize the altru-
istic intentions of policymakers to a greater extent” (52). However, the revisionists’
accounts question “the sincerity of altruistic intentions of the policy of assimilation,
viewing the benevolent policy statements of Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) and
government propaganda as largely rhetorical justifications for a more cynical, self-
serving program” (52–53). Although Trevithick identifies the uniqueness of insti-
tutions and student’s experiences, his framework completely misses the important
aspect of Identity politics and its underlying connection to the function of Education
as a component of the colonial apparatus.
The historian Elizabeth Furniss displays a comprehensive and somewhat different
perspective in her Victims of Benevolence: The Dark Legacy of the Williams Lake
Residential School. She attempts to study “the long-term structural relations between
First Nations and the Canadian government” (Furniss 15). She focuses on the
Shuswap people of the William Lake area and points out that “for the first thirty
years of the school’s operation, Natives... struggled against the assimilation plan, the
residential school program, and Oblates control over their children’s lives” (13–14).
She also examines the tragic deaths of two students at the Mission school, highlighting
the collusion of Oblates and the government. The residential school literature review
carried out by the Assembly of First Nations in 1994 “finds fault with most of the
thirty-odd Canadian-focused studies chosen for review, not because of their overall
conclusions... but rather because their conclusions lack the intensity and validity
which oral and written ‘indigenous testimony’ would give them” (Carney 15–16).
It is apparent that Europeans presumed that they were “superior to that of Indige-
nous peoples, not only in terms of technology but in terms of moral, intellectual,
and artistic development” (Furniss 15). Hence there is a need to move beyond the
simplistic dichotomy of resistance and oppression and instead attempt to examine
the complex ways in which the colonial apparatus Education functioned in the
contexts of pre- and post-confederation Canada and produced a heterogeneous array
of perspectives among Indigenous People.
Missionaries, Government, and Schools
Indigenous children of Canada were given modern education through three different
mediums such as residential schools, industrial schools, and day schools during the
pre- and post-confederation of Canada respectively with a view to assimilate them
into Canadian culture. In this process, Christian missionaries and government played
significant roles in their own way. Although there were many Christian denominations
existed, “Catholic and Protestant churches provided much of the original direction on
where schools would be placed and how the school system would grow” (Canadian
Geographic). Similarly, government Indian agents and officials from a wide variety
of different departments played a central role in the development and maintenance of
the residential school system (Canadian Geographic). In 1620, Recollects established
the first residential school near Quebec City, but Mohawk Indian Residential School
was the first to be established in the pre-Confederation era under the combined aegis
of the Church and the colonial government. The Mohawk school served as the model
for many schools that were subsequently established across the country.
There was also a strong link between the establishment of schools and the signing
of various Treaties. As a result, after 1867, the federal government took the respon-
sibility for “status Indians” while the provincial or territorial government took the
responsibility for “non-status Indians,” Inuit and Metis children. This division of
responsibility led to differences in the curricula and in teachers—certified teachers
in the provincial schools and mostly non-certified missionaries as teachers in feder-
ally run schools. Hence, the curriculum of federal schools included mostly religious
instruction. By the year 1900, there were about 226 federally run day schools on
reserves. A statistical report in 1940 exposed the lack of effectiveness of formal
education due to the undue importance given to religious instruction in its curricula.
This finding led the federal government, with the cooperation of provincial educa-
tion authorities, to change over to a policy of education integration, enabling students
to attend provincial elementary and high schools (McCue). Hence any objection to
education by Indigenous people has something to do with the quality of educa-
tion offered rather than with rejecting western education. Nevertheless, postcolonial
framework presents it otherwise.
There were differences in the way Day Schools and Residential Schools operated.
In the day school system, indigenous children continued to stay with their families
and attended school during the day. In the residential school system, the children
were removed from the family by force and kept at boarding schools until the age
of 14 years. Significant damage was caused to indigenous children by the residen-
tial school system because it deprived them of the benefits of parenting inputs and
role models, community support serving as an extended family for orphaned chil-
dren, shared family experience, and imbibed oral tradition. Indigenous children who
attended day schools did not face these deprivations. In some cases, the residential
school system played havoc with parent–child dynamics; along with losing respon-
sibility for the welfare of the child, the parent often lost trust and respect as well. The
important role of child-rearing was denied to the parents, and the rich experience
262 K. Chinnathambi
of a shared family life was denied to the children. For example, James Sewid, who
attended day school in his Nimpkish village reserve, presents numerous examples
which illustrate how he was brought up among his native community, whereas John-
ston records nothing of his family and community but only his school experience,
since he was at a residential school. C. Atteneave recollects, “Neither they nor their
own parents had ever known life in a family from the age they first entered school.
Parents had no memories and no patterns to follow in rearing children except for
the regimentation of mass sleeping and impersonal schedules” (qtd. in Lefrance and
Collins 109). It is understandable that the weakening of family structure challenged
the survival of native culture and society.
Yvonne Johnston makes it clear in her autobiography that her own unpleasant
experience was a long shadow cast by her mother’s and the previous generation’s
experiences of sexual and emotional abuse at residential schools. This can be better
understood in the light of her narration of her sexual abuse by her family members.
A former student from a Kuper Island school validates this perspective. He says,
“the Kuper Island, British Columbia, school was better than being in the chaotic
home life that we had. My parents went to Residential school, and they didn’t know
how to parent and suffered alcoholism. There was physical abuse at home, just the
chaos of an alcoholic home” (“Survivors Speak” 12). The day school system had
its own set of serious issues. One was the lack of trained or certified teachers. This
was because good teachers preferred high-paying jobs in provincial schools rather
than the poorly-paid positions in federally run Day schools. During the winter, the
students could not withstand the cold because of the poor construction of school
building and lack of warm clothing. In addition, because the families were poor the
children had to take up seasonal manual work in the September-June term, leading to
meager attendance in the schools. There were also too few inspectors to investigate
the operation of these schools. Under these circumstances, only unqualified or under-
qualified teachers could be recruited to these schools (Walls 366). On the positive
side, the children had a family life, used their native language for communication, and
enjoyed continuity of cultural activities. These distinct differences in the outcomes of
day schooling versus residential schooling for native children are evident in the fact
that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology and the accompanying compensation
were addressed only to Indigenous People who had undergone residential schooling
(Walls 362). Indigenous People filed a case in court to protest discrimination against
day school goers in the matter of compensation, arguing that both systems caused
damage by inflicting a policy of forced assimilation. However, the thinking of the
government was that it was the residential school inmates who had suffered the
severest deprivations and damage that entitled them to compensation.
The indigenous experience in the school system was not a homogeneous
one. Sometimes it was positive, and sometimes not, depending on the individual
concerned. At times, the same school offered two different experiences to students at
two different times. Rita Joe provides an example of this in her autobiography. The
conversation between Rita Joe and her husband Frank reveals how the timeframe
plays a significant role in forming a positive or negative perspective of the school.
Rita Joe finds her school experience to be a positive one, whereas her husband takes
a negative view of his experience in the same school. When they came to know that
some of the nuns who had taught them were living in Halifax, they decide to go and
meet them. Rita Joe describes how the nuns received them: “When I walked into her
room, Sister Justinian put out her arms for me, and I went into them. She was over
eighty years old, and she cried. I cried buckets, too. I think she had heard too many
negative stories about the school—all the nuns heard the negative stories. It was true
that many negative things occurred, but there was also a lot of good that happened”
(SRJ 47). But Frank brought up his negative thoughts of the school in the meeting
with Sister Justinian: “Frank talked negatively and tried to vent his emotions. I kept
snapping at him, in Mi;kmaq, “Frank, shut up they’re old now. We’ve got to forgive
and forget” (48). Nevertheless, Joe’s words change Frank. He says, “Sister, I don’t
hate you... It’s just that I was hurt so much when I was in there, and Rita was hurt
and a lot of us were hurt. Some of us didn’t have fathers or mothers, and when
you knock down people like that. They become demoralized” (SRJ 47). Joe states,
“My husband had... attended the school for a little while, too, but at a different time
than I had” (47). She is referring to the fact that Frank and she had attended the
school in different periods of time and approached negative experience of schools in
a dissimilar way. Along the same line, Johnston presents two different experiences
in the same school, St. Peter Claver’s School which later became Garnier School. He
records the functional differences of St. Peter Claver’s School and Garnier School.
He approaches the latter positively unlike the former. He himself acknowledges the
role that the timeframe plays in the matter of perspective. He states,
In reply to the inevitable question, “Is there a place for residential schools in the educational
system?” I respond with a qualified yes. Some who attended Garnier after 1946 have said,
“It was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.” However, for those going
to St. Peter Claver’s in the pre-Garnier days, it was “the worst possible experience.” Just as
private schools have a place in the educational system, so too do the residential schools, but
under vastly different terms, conditions and formats from those that existed in the residential
school as I first encountered it. (ISD 11–12)
Hence it may be noted that the memoirs of Johnston and Rita Joe highlight the
following: (a) difference between two indigenous students who attended the same
school at different times, (b) differences in experience of the same native student
in the same school at different times, and (c) differences in experiences of native
students in the three school systems. Johnston himself takes a nuanced perspective.
He finds fault with the school, but he also appreciates the school for making changes
in the food offered and for the freedom given to the students.
As there were two different types of education given to Indigenous People of
Canada, it would be interesting to study the statistics relating to students who were
given on-reserve and off-reserve education. According to Canadian Policy Research
Network (CPRN) report:
On-reserve, the responsibility for education lies formally with the Department of Indian
Affairs; in practice, the responsibility lies with individual band councils. Off-reserve, the
responsibility lies with the relevant province. As Aboriginals have “moved to town,” the
provincial role has become increasingly important. Within any province, the two systems
are intertwined. Across Canada, only one-third of the Aboriginal population live on a reserve;
264 K. Chinnathambi
two thirds live off-reserve and one half live in a city. Two fifths of the children living on-
reserve attend nearby provincial schools. Hence, approximately one Aboriginal student in
five is attending an on-reserve band-operated school; four in five are attending a school
within a provincial K to 12 system. (Richards iii)
It is evident from this report that in the course of time indigenous people moved
toward urban areas and enrolled in the provincial system of education. The expe-
rience of indigenous students in reserve schools and provincial schools may vary
significantly.
Heterogeneity in Indigenous Voices
Rita Joe records in her autobiography her decision to go or not to go to school in

two different circumstances. Although she likes to go to school, she also understands
her position in her various foster homes and responds according to the situation.
She recalls, “Sometimes, the family would ask me if I wanted to go to the Indian
Residential School; I always said no. I tried to say what I thought they wanted me
to say. I was like that with all my foster parents – I said what I thought they wanted
to hear, in order to make everybody happy” (SRJ 44). Joe’s unwillingness to go to
school is artificial because it emerges from her situation at her foster home rather than
from the stereotypical presentation of residential school as a place of oppression and
abuse. For orphaned children like Rita Joe, it seems that the school provided a thread
of hope to cling to. Hence, contrary to the stereotypes, (Indian agents abducting
kids from parents and taking them to residential schools) she writes with strong
determination to the Indian agent to take her to a residential school: “I wrote a letter
to the Indian Agent in Shubenacadie, Mr. H.C. Rice. I asked him to please come
next Wednesday to take me to an Indian Residential school, because that was the
day my foster mother would be away picking mayflowers” (SRJ 45). Her accounts
of school also present it as a place which transformed her life: “I was glad to go to
school; I had never been there before and I was happy being part of a class. ‘This
is a dog. This is a cat,’ I recited, along with the other children” (SRJ 21). When
the teacher first asked her name, Joe blushed and stammered. Other students teased
her, making her feel dejected and forlorn. Then she made a vow to herself that she
would excel learning. “My pride lives in my education... I will relate wonders to my
people” (41). At school, she works hard and tries to create a favorable impression in
others. For her, the school is the storehouse of knowledge. She writes “I didn’t mind
the teaching I received in that school, I just wish there had been more of it... There
they were: books of knowledge, I just grabbed the first book I came to, I was in such
a hurry to read anything… From that time on, I worked hard to have the freedom of
reading” (53). Rita Joe sees her decision to go to school as a sign of her intelligence
and maturity at an early age.
Johnston’s memoir Indian School Days also begins with positive sentiments
toward his Spanish residential school. He writes, “Were it not for the “school” (in its
name), Spanish might have been as dull as Walford. But Spanish had “the school,”
and the good people of the village forsook the train to watch baseball, softball, foot-
ball, and hockey games, or to attend The Pirates of Penzance and other dramas put
on by the boys” (ISD 3). He also contrasts his opinion of the Spanish Residential
School with that of general one. “Spanish! It was a word synonymous with Resi-
dential school, penitentiary, reformatory, exile, dungeon, whippings, kicks, slaps, all
rolled into one, “Spanish” for us came to mean only one thing: “the school,” known as
St. Peter Claver’s Indian Residential School and then later, from 1945, as the Garnier
Residential School” (ISD 6). He compares the punishment meted out at Shingwauk
School and Garnier Residential School: “It was reported that at Shingwauk Residen-
tial School little boys were forced to stand in line, hands joined, to receive shocks
from an electric socket... Even if by comparison with the abuse and maltreatment
inflicted upon little boys in other institutions, the boys at Spanish received less malev-
olent treatment” (ISD 7). Johnston’s comparison highlights the dissimilar experience
of students in contemporary schools. He also compares the standard of education at
his school with that in other schools: “By comparison with courses of study in other
schools, our curriculum would have been regarded as below standard” (ISD 66). This
he attributes to the lack of a well-stocked library, and his not attending of classes
from 9 am to 4 pm (due to work at school). Commenting on his school experience,
he adds, “unless one has a sense of worth and dignity, resourcefulness, intelligence,
and shrewdness are of a little advantage” (66). Johnston’s comparison presents the
uniqueness of each school either on negative side or positive side or the possibility
for the mix of both.
Brass recalls, contrary to Johnston and Joe, the problems she faced when she
and her father chose the best school to study. She states, “My father, Fred Dieter,
wanted me to have a good education and had no use for Indian Schools... it was
the rule at that time that all Treaty Indian children had to attend an Indian boarding
school, so that’s where I went till I was twelve years old” (IWTW 4). Indigenous
people desired education and made efforts to put their kids in the best school for the
best education to cope up with the new social structure. Brass’ account also reveals
that the schools functioned under pressure due to the ideological and philosoph-
ical differences among the various denominations of the church. Interestingly, her
narrative also shows how such differences enabled indigenous Canadians to exercise
their agency under oppressive conditions. The inter-denomination conflict gave rise
to competitive and aggressive recruitment efforts by the respective schools. Brass
relates the example of parents being offered bribes by schools to send their children
as students. According to her, this ongoing conflict between the Presbyterian and
Roman Catholic churches provided the native parents wider options to get the type
of education they desired for their children.
A Presbyterian Indian boarding school was erected on the west end of the Okanese Reserve
and another Indian school at Lebret under the management of the Roman Catholic Church.
Dad said that the principals of these schools used to bribe the parents to send their children
to their schools. He thought his grandfather got paid for him to go to both schools but
somehow, he landed in the nearest one to the reserve, the File Hills Presbyterian boarding
school. (IWTW 6)
266 K. Chinnathambi
While Johnston and Rita Joe compare and describe their experiences in residential
schools, James Sewid’s autobiography paints a picture of his Day school experiences.
Sewid’s account shows his unabated interest in attending school, and the struggles
he had with the native children of Nimpkish village. Like Rita Joe, he also regards
education as an important asset for life. He states, “I knew it was important to have
an education and learn to read and write and speak English” (GNLH 27). However,
he wasn’t allowed to join the residential school in his own village for two reasons:
one, he was the future chief and people would tease him if he went to school, and
two, what was taught in the school was believed to be something harmful according
to Indigenous People: “No, no, you can’t go. We don’t want the other kids to tease
you and all that. We don’t want you to go there because that place is no good.
They’re going to teach you things that aren’t good for you” (26). Nevertheless, his
grandmother believed that education could unite and uplift Indian people. She urged
and motivated Sewid to get educated in order to lead the community toward progress.
Unlike the other autobiographers reviewed here, Sewid had the opportunity to
learn from the elders of his community as well, because he attended a day school.
He recalls, “during those early years of my life I moved around a lot and was looked
after by a lot of people... they were all teaching me how to be a leader of my people
when I grew up” (GNLH 44). He records that two types of schools existed during
the time he was a student. He states, “Robby Bell, my uncle, had already left Village
Island to go to the Anglican residential school at Alert Bay when I moved to live with
my grandmother and told her I wanted to go to the day school. The kids in Anglican
residential school lived right there all the time, but those kids who were living at home
in Alert Bay village would go to the day school” (46). His record also reveals that
native teachers were available to teach native children in day schools. He describes
his closeness with the Indian teacher: “The Indian teacher at the day school, George
Luther, was a great friend of mine. He liked me somehow” (46). He also recalls that
his grandmother would wake up early even during snowy days to prepare breakfast
and send him to school before anyone else got there. He writes that he liked going
to school although he found Arithmetic difficult: “Going to school was new to me
and I found it awfully hard. I really enjoyed school and that was the main reason I
came to Alert Bay, I wanted to go to school badly, and there was no school in Village
Island... I enjoyed school very much, but I had a lot of enemies there as a small boy”
(47). Although Sewid did not have problems with education in the day school per se,
he was given a hard time by the local native children of Nimpkish village because
he belonged to another village. As a result, both Sewid and his grandmother were
treated as strangers and teased by the Nimpkish community. He states that “They
didn’t like her to be living on their res because she was an outsider and they used to
make remarks to her. They were doing the same thing to me when I was in school...
the other kids used to tease me and I had a lot of fights with them. I always was
pretty big for my age and nobody could ever stand up to me even if there were two of
them... I wasn’t accepted there” (47). His record of his years in the Nimpkish reserve
in the 1920s throws light on how discriminated between members of their own tribal
group and those of other groups. This also points out how the creation of reserves
also played a role in setting native people against each other.
Similar experiences of non-acceptance and alienation are recorded by James

Tyman in his autobiography, Inside Out. He recalls that he felt like a stranger, both
in his adoptive family and in the white public school that he attended. He states:
I began to hate myself that year. I was getting teased by the white kids, and nothing I said
seemed to matter. If I talked back it only made them taunt me more... but it hurt, I’d go home
and look in the bathroom mirror and curse the colour of my skin... I’d go home and scrub
my hands, hoping to wash the darkness off. (IO 15)
James Tyman’s experiences mirror those of Sewid despite the differences in

setting–-white family and white school versus alien native reserve and day school.
Whereas Tyman longs for the company of indigenous friends, Sewid is tormented
by the native children of Nimpkish village in the day school. Sewid and Tyman face
non-acceptance and alienation in different contexts. Rita Joe’s perspective regarding
community is very different, arising from a very different experience. She states:
Living on the reservation was different from living in Halifax. As in all Native
communities, the people helped each other. There are some people in Eskasoni who
have helped me in more ways than I can say. There is a friendly atmosphere among
my people that I have always known and felt—we share stories, problems, caring for
our babies, recipes for Native herbal medicines—and hardship sometimes seems less
hard because we can talk about it with each other. The soup bone making the rounds
is our favorite joke. I have been sharing problems and jokes with friends especially
other women on the reservation, since I arrived in Eskasoni in 1956. The friends I
made then are still my friends. That is why I like living on a reservation, even today.
It is like living with an extended family (SRJ 80).
There are three different perspectives emerging from Sewid, Tyman, and Joe,
based on their differing experiences, and depending on location and gender. Tyman
meets similar treatment outside school, in a white social structure, as Sewid and his
grandmother Lucy receive in the Nimpkish reserve, a native social structure. Tyman
describes it with reference to his friendship with “outcasts” ‘Francis, Andrew, Phil,
and an older brother named William’ (IO 17) and how their parents prevented them
from befriending him.
The family had countless arguments over the years – about me. Should I be allowed in their
house? Their father was opposed to the idea. I wasn’t sure why at first, but later it became
obvious. The head of their family did not want an Indian hanging around his house and kids.
(17)
Tyman states that it was unthinkable for that white family that whites and Indians
could have any kind of relationship. The boys were his best friends but their father
threw him out of the house on a few occasions. Although the sons protested the
injustice, the father banished Tyman from his property forever. He describes a similar
experience with the school principal and his son.
Our principal then was Mr. Allan. What was interesting about this was that his son was
another of my good friends, and like the city boys’ father, the man did not like me one bit. If
I spoke up when he was quizzing the class, he’d give me a poisonous stare. It didn’t do my
self-esteem much good, being disliked by the school principal. (18)
268 K. Chinnathambi
A string of such incidents altered his personality and helped to turn him into a
rebel against the school authority in the years to come. He states, “I hated school, I
hated the principal, I hated being Indian” (18). Tyman draws attention to yet another
conflict with Indian kids who were beginning to attend public school in greater
numbers at the time. He describes how Indian kids who lived on the reserve hated
honkies (Metis): “They hated honkies as much as honkies hated them. A lot of them
would talk about how their big brother was in jail for beating somebody. ‘You pick
on me and I’ll tell my brother’ was all anyone needed to hear. The kid was left alone”
(IO 18). The rift between Tyman and Indian children was due to his friendship with
white children. He states, “Reserve Indians hated me because my friends were ‘white
trash’, as they put it, and most of the white kids hated me because I was a scummy
Indian” (18). These led him to avoid both the white racists and indigenous peers
and to engage with new friends, who are mostly out casts. However, he does not
describe his own adoptive white family as being bigoted. Tyman presents them not
as racists like the other whites, but rather as victims of racist discourse at school and
outside. He states, “Racism hurt them, too. My older sister, Donna, had to put up with
questions like, how’s the little Indian doing? or they’d compare me to black paint,
just to get her mad” (19). His reference to “more and more Indian kids coming to
public school” (18) by the year 1973 stands in contrast to the experiences of Sewid,
Brass, Johnston, and Joe. At the same time, his reference also hints at the fact that
during this time, many residential schools were closed, and the welfare system took
over the role. James Tyman was a pawn of this same welfare system which placed
native children in white families through adoption and ensured that they were sent
to white public schools.
Yvonne Johnson labels herself as being “stupid” in the white system of learning:
“in a group of educated people with their systematic, often formula ways of white
learning, I seem to be stupid” (JCW 76). She also records that she was the victim of
racial discrimination even before she started school. Tyman too experienced racial
discrimination at school, but Johnson got a taste of it even earlier because the society
in Butte, where she lived, was created, and controlled by whites. Tyman also recalls
how his appearance was enough to set him apart from white society and white
children. He becomes self-conscious about his skin color and starts trying to scrub
it clean.
Yvonne Johnson’s autobiography presents an important duality in the experience
of indigenous children regarding school. While it was a place where the indigenous
children experienced abuse, it was also a place of security where they survived
through the grinding poverty of the depression years. Johnson recalls her mother
Cecilia’s experience: “her (my mother’s) parents were so desperately poor they felt
that they had to give up all their seven kids, from Josephine to Rita, because in school
they’d at least get enough food to survive. So their bodies survived their poverty,
sometimes abused but somehow alive, but what happened inside their hearts, their
heads?” (JCW 84). The parents focus on the immediacy of physical survival of
their children and find the school to be a haven. The children like Yvonne Johnson,
however, find that their school experience leaves scars on their psyches. Johnson
states that “school had never helped her learn much of anything except how to
disappear” (121).
However, Rudy Wiebe points out that Johnson liked the story classes in school,
and these made her want to go to school. He states that the only time Johnson spoke
up in grade school was in the context of her love for Charlotte’s Web. Johnson reveals
how much she loved that story. She narrates:
I loved that story very much … it was the only time I wanted to go to school and once I was
drawing a spider web on my desk, ink on wood, and the teacher saw me and was furious. She
demanded I repeat what she had just read. I was so excited I stood up and talked! I quoted
the book back to her, almost word for word from the beginning, and she was so stunned at
my memory... (121)
It is evident, therefore that, while taking an overall negative view of her school
life, Johnson also points out the positives in it. It may be noted that the speech
therapy classes the school offered and her personal efforts to read and learn at the
library were also important parts of her school experience. Her experience with her
teacher in McKinley school in Grade Six provides an insight into the dynamics of
the school space. When her teacher ignored her, “she would go to the library and
read on the machines where the text would be illumined for a brief time, and you
read it and then tried to answer the questions that followed... she read The Godfather
and other books she found interesting” (JCW 121). It is apparent that the school had
its redeeming features for Johnson. Her reference to the Bible-story book as an only
book available at home is in stark contrast to the many books at school available for
her to read. However, her reference to her mother Cecelia’s experience in the context
of Delmas Roman Catholic School brings to light how the school attempted to instill
“good Catholic behavior” in the students via drilling and beating (86). Also, Yvonne
Johnson is sympathetic toward the plight of native women. Wiebe describes how
Yvonne spoke sadly while referring to them:
No wonder Native women become barflies... where else one can go for momentary relief?
In this I see a strange pattern between Mom and myself, me finally running from the United
States to Canada—to the Indian streets of Winnipeg—and she, running from residential
school in Canada found an empty rez, went looking for her parents, and got stuck in Great
Falls. She learned survival from the really tough Indians in Montana. I was my mother thirty
years later. (84–85)
The conversation between Rudy Wiebe and Clarence brings out Yvonne Johnson’s
contrasting levels of attainment in school: outstanding in physical education, art and
music, unsatisfactory and needing improvement in academics. Johnson also records
how others viewed her: “Everyone told me I was stupid anyway. I’d flunked Grade
One, then I flunked Grade Eight—I must be like they said, stupid, and probably
crazy too” (JCW 122). As a result, Johnson quit studies for good in January 1977.
Her account of a conversation with her father reveals how the role of education in life
was presented to her. “Go to school, Get a job—that was it, orders, arbitrary orders
but never a conversation about choices, about what might be possible” (JCW 122).
However, her failure in education and negative attitude toward school may be due to
her bitter experiences in her family.
270 K. Chinnathambi
It is evident from the autobiographical narratives of the various authors that each
one’s experience was unique, although there were similarities in some respects. Each
author shows a distinctive perspective depending on time and place, and the specific
circumstances surrounding their school years. None of them disliked education per
se, but the occurrences at school made them dislike the experience. Hence, indigenous
resistance of indigenous education must be understood not as resisting the educational
system but as a demand for proper educational system.
Conclusion
Each autobiography presents a delicate convergence of agency and subjection within

the institutional structure. The very structure deployed for native subjection provides
space for both resistance and subjection, depending on the context and period of
time. This contradiction constitutes a complex array of interlinkages—school to
politics, school to a position within the mainstream, school to prison, and school
to sexual abuse. James Sewid elevates himself through schooling to an honorable
position and believes that education is very important for personal and community
development. Rita Joe and Eleanor Brass consider Education as something that is
essential for the survival of the individual as well as the community. They are strong
proponents of formal education. Rita Joe emerges as an important indigenous writer
and representative of the indigenous community through her writings. The identity
Rita Joe has created for herself, both as a person and as a member of her community,
runs headlong against stereotypes. The honorary doctorate and the awards she
received are evidence of how she made use of Education. Eleanor Brass received a
Certificate of Merit from the government and was appointed Director of Peace River
Friendship Centre. She was also presented with the Jubilee Medal from the Queen.
It was Education that enabled her to become a representative of her community.
Similarly, Basil H. Johnston, himself the recipient of an honorary doctorate, also
strikes a positive note about Education. Eleanor Brass, Rita Joe, and Johnston have
authored many books and brought to light native tradition and culture through their
writings. James Tyman’s life trajectory is very different. He lands in prison from
school. The bitter racial discrimination that he experiences in school leads him to
associate himself with undesirable elements, resulting in his incarceration. He is not
for Education because he considers public school as a place for discrimination and
oppression. He believes that it turned him into an embodiment of self-destruction and
crime. Along the same lines, Yvonne Johnson also considers her mother as a victim
of her Residential school. She considers the sexual abuse that the generation of her
mother may have undergone at Residential school as being the prime reason for her
own position as a victim of sexual abuse at home and in her community. Although
her father tells her that going to school is important to get a job, she is not convinced.
The conflicting positions adopted by the different authors point to the different
degrees of victimhood or agency that operated in each context. They also point to the
way institutions operated and produced contradictory responses. The constitutive
factors for these differences are predominantly the context and the period of study.
Both subjection to and resistance to authority figures are equally indispensable for
indigenous authors, who may present these attitudes in varied degrees, either through
the voices of fellow students or through their own, in their autobiographies. That is,
the author is sometimes the active agent and sometimes the bystander or witness
in instances of resistance or of victimization. These differences can be understood
in two ways: (i) differences among the authors in their response to the apparatus
Education, and (ii) differences in the way each autobiography recalls and presents
the positions of fellow students as unduly privileged, unjustly punished, moderate,
or extreme in resistance. Each autobiography is thus also a biography, a witness
to events, while describing fellow indigenous students’ experience within the same
school environment. The collective voice often is at odds with the author’s subjective
experience, and vice versa. Thus, each autobiography needs to be studied not only
as one person’s experience but those of many. These differences provide space to
locate agency, victim, and in-between positions in varied degrees. These differences
cannot be brought under a single label “postcolonialism” and the dichotomy “either
victim or resistance” as postcolonial theories advocate, or as postcolonial research
frameworks represent Indigenous Canadian identity. Native Literature is beyond the
synchronic framework “colonizer vs colonized.”
The selected autobiographies are the embodiment of this interfusion between
Western structure and indigenous content, a conscious choice via treaties. King calls
such interfusion “interfusional or polemical” literature, one of the many varieties
of Native Canadian literature. The different voices in the autobiographies, varied in
pitch, tone and emphasis, present the school as a place for both the negative, positive,
and neutral experiences. Those who continued to follow native practices ensured the
continuity of native identity, while those who accepted Western education used it as
a vehicle to make indigenous practices and history known to the world. Thus, para-
doxically, both ends of this spectrum of indigenous experiences contributed subtly
toward ensuring indigenous cultural continuum. It can be concluded that Education,
as a colonial apparatus, has played a significant role in creating tension between
Indigenous People and non-Indigenous people in the representation of Native Cana-
dian identity. Such tension also implies that (a) there was a gap between the actual
intention with which the colonial apparatus “Education” was deployed and its actual
function in varied colonial contexts, (b) colonial discourse and postcolonial discourse
act not in dissimilar ways when it comes to identity politics.
272 K. Chinnathambi
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Chapter 18
The Cross-Cultural Dynamics of Humor
and the Benign Violation Theory:
An Application to Travel Literature
Rosalind Buckton-Tucker
Abstract Cultural differences as depicted in literature are perhaps nowhere more

evident than in the expression of humor. Although a universal human emotion, humor
is usually grounded in its cultural context, so that the antecedents of humor in one
culture do not necessarily translate to another. Humor is a prominent element in travel
literature, whether in situations where the protagonists are coping with hardship or
where they are trying to make sense out of confusing or embarrassing circumstances.
There is an extensive body of research on cross-cultural humor that aims to analyze
the manner in which it is created. This paper will focus in particular on the Benign
Violation theory, according to which a humor stimulus, to be funny, cannot be too
banal or mild (benign) nor conversely be overly offensive or shocking (violation).
These constructs enable us to examine systematically the dynamics of humor in the
context of travel literature, in which the cultural identity of the traveler versus the
Other can often create or alternatively thwart humor through social violations.
Keywords Humor · Incongruity · Superiority · Relief · Benign violation theories ·

Travel literature · Cultural differences · Otherness
Introduction
Travel literature has risen steadily in popularity with the advent of cultural glob-
alization, and humor is a frequently recurring ingredient, particularly in modern
travel literature but by no means absent in early examples of the genre. It may arise
from universally humorous situations, from differences in cultural norms or from
simple linguistic misunderstandings. Humor may be juxtaposed with serious events
and reflections, perhaps as a form of relief. It may be used as a strategy to cope
with alienation from the uncomfortable and even dangerous situations which occur
in exploratory or pioneering travel. Some writers appear to relish the humorous
R. Buckton-Tucker (B)
American University of Kuwait, Salmiya, Kuwait
e-mail: rjbuckton@yahoo.co.uk
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_18
276 R. Buckton-Tucker
portrayal of the bizarre, stressing the unpredictable nature of travel and happily ridi-
culing their own mishaps or mistakes. Dialogue is often used as a medium for humor
in order to illustrate cultural idiosyncrasies or miscommunications as directly as
possible, while description contains humor through, for example, choice of vocab-
ulary, exaggeration, understatement or irony. In perceiving and recording the comic
in the encounters of the other with an unfamiliar culture, the travel writer typically
displays a spirit of inquiry and receptiveness to alien experiences, which renders the
journey and the insight gained from it more accessible to the reader. Thus, humor
is a primary vehicle in much travel literature in order to engage the reader, convey
affection for the target culture, and create a positive attitude toward the unknown.
Pisciotti (2019) reports that some individuals have become so “addicted” to
travel that the intervals between trips represent a form of withdrawal from dromo-
mania—“historically…the uncontrollable urge to walk or wander…now used to non-
clinically describe an exaggerated desire or a wanderlust to travel” (The Merriam
Webster Medical Dictionary, 2019). Basumatary (2018), in his treatise on the impor-
tance of travel literature, identifies a number of benefits associated with the genre.
First, it has contributed to new perspectives of exploration both in English litera-
ture and of the human condition. Second, it enhances, from a psychological and
socio-cultural.perspective, the understanding of individual experiences. Third, it has
the potential to impact positively cross-disciplinary research in such fields as soci-
ology, anthropology, geography, philosophy, and science. Finally, it inspires others
to engage in travel and to write about their accounts by vicariously sharing important
information on the logistics of travel and thus reduces the perceived risks associ-
ated with it. An interesting angle on these benefits is presented by Indian writers
Nandi (2014) and Mathur (1991) when they utilize a “reverse” prism and humor-
ously examine western cultures from the travel experiences of Indian travelers Naba-
neeta Dev Sen and Gopal Kumar. The equivalent of an “eastern superiority” context
provides hilarious insights into the cultural differences that prevail in both societies.
The objective of this research is to develop and present a cognitive model of
humor by integrating a number of psychological constructs to contribute to a better
understanding of how humor works in the writing process. Specifically, the work
of Warren and McGraw (2015) on the concept of Benign Violation will be used to
formulate a more scientific approach to the examination of the psychodynamics of
humor in literature.
The rest of the paper consists of a two-part literature review encompassing the
role of humor in travel literature and the psychological constructs underlying the
theories of Benign Violation. Next, a rationale for developing a model based on
these constructs and applying them to selected works of travel literature is presented.
The outcomes of this psycho-sociological application are then discussed along with
their implications and suggestions for further research.
18 The Cross-Cultural Dynamics … 277
Literature Review
The literature review begins with a general assessment of how humor has been incor-
porated into the travel writing genre. A discussion of different humor constructs is
then undertaken, along with examples supporting their relevance. A more system-
atic framework for integrating these constructs—derived from the Benign Violation
Concept (BVT) of incongruity (Warren & McGraw, 2015)—is then presented and
examined in terms of the constructs’ antecedents and cognitive dynamics.
Humor and Travel Literature
What is humor? Writings on humor have been traced back to ancient times, resulting
in an immense number of perspectives and definitions, and include contributions to
its understanding by major philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Kierkegaard, Kant,
and Schopenhauer, to name a few (Holt, 2008 and Morreall, 2016). In one useful
clarification, Martin (2007) states that “the psychological process of humor involves
a social context, a cognitive appraisal process comprising the perception of playful
incongruity, the emotional response of mirth, and the vocal- behavioral expression
of laughter” (p. 6). The word “playful” is significant, suggesting in relation to travel
literature an almost childlike enthusiasm on both the author’s and the reader’s part
for the absurdities that occur during a journey to discover the culturally unfamiliar.
How can travel literature be defined? Arguing that travel literature is “the most
socially important of all literary genres,” Youngs (2007) comments that “travel
writing consists of predominantly factual, first-person prose accounts of travels that
have been undertaken by the author-narrator” and offers the following explanation:
It records our temporal and spatial progress. It throws light on how we define ourselves
and on how we identify others. Its construction of our sense of ‘me’ and ‘you’, ‘us’ and
‘them’, operates on individual and national levels and in the realms of psychology, society
and economics. The processes of affiliation and differentiation at play within it can work to
forge alliances, precipitate crises and provoke wars (p. 1).
Some works of travel literature are overtly designed to entertain while informing
(for example, certain titles by Twain, Raban, and Bryson), while others contain more
subtle elements of humor interwoven with the subject matter. Humor as a literary
device provides a change of mood from the sombre to the light-hearted, just as in
life a serious event may be the subject of jokes as a form of relief from tension.
The Psychology of Humor
The cognitive dynamics of humor have been explored from a number of conceptual
perspectives. Relief, Superiority, and Incongruity theories—all of which have been
much researched and revised over the years—are first described and applied below
(where possible) in the context of travel literature vignettes. Next, these constructs—
in particular Incongruity—are expanded and integrated into a more comprehensive
framework derived from the theoretical models of Benign Violation.
Humor and Relief
The Relief theory can be defined, simply, as relief from tension. Monro (1988) refers
to it as “the feeling of relief that comes from the removal of restraint” (p. 354). Ancient
philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Quintillian lay the groundwork
of Relief theory with their works on the interrelationship of negative and positive
emotions and humor (Perks, 2012). Its more modern provenance purportedly dates
back to Lord Shaftesbury, who in 1709 visualized that tension was akin to a hydraulic
system that required periodic depressurization or venting with respect to the build-
up of “animal spirits” that if unchecked could lead to adverse social and personal
consequences (Morreall, 2016). This basic model has been further developed and
refined through the works of Dewey (1894), Freud (1905), and Spencer (1911) that
basically propound that humor is a means of defusing or dispersing psychic energy.
However, Morreall (2016) observes that more recent research utilizing this construct
has not been forthcoming because in his view the underlying propositions are neither
empirically provable nor tenable. Smuts (2009) further reinforces this position with
the argument that the timing of humorous stimuli evokes emotional responses without
“energy build-up.” Spencer (1911) observes that the relationship of the “saving”
versus the non-expenditure of pent-up energy is actually tautological. Holland (1982)
viewed Relief theory as simply a stimulus subset of incongruity theory. Despite its
theoretical deficiencies, Relief theory continues to appeal intuitively as a descriptive
explanation of humor in the works of writers, comics, playwrights, and other artists
in non-scholarly publications and the popular press (Provine, 2000; Holt, 2008;
Borgella, 2016; and Wilson, 2019).
The intuitive attraction can be understood when examining various experiences
chronicled in the travel literature. Travel, whether at a simple or more sophisti-
cated level, inevitably contains discomforts, both physical and mental, as travelers
encounter hardships and misunderstandings and sometimes dangers; description of
these differences between the familiar and the untried is the basis of much travel
literature. The writer often chooses to couch such recollections in humor, describing
unpleasant details with a notable absence of self-pity (also illustrating his/her ability
to cope and to turn the unsavory or frightening elements of an experience into a joke.)
Newby, in his classic account of mountaineering misadventures in Afghanistan,
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, while providing a wealth of topographical and
historical detail (Hanbury-Tenison (2006) describes him as “the most meticulous
and reliable of all anthologists), is clearly writing for laughs. He recalls how he and
Hugh Carless, his diplomat friend who has proposed the trip to Afghanistan, spent a
weekend learning the rudiments of rock climbing in Wales:
Full of boiled egg and crumpet, we clung upside down to the boulder like bluebottles, while
the Doctor shouted encouragement to us from a safe distance. Occasionally one of us would
fall off and land with a painful thump on the back of his head.
‘YOU MUST NOT FALL OFF. Imagine that there is a thousand- foot drop under you.’
‘I am imagining it but I still can’t stay on’ (Newby, 1981, p. 37).
We can conclude that, writing after the event, restraint in the form of apprehension
has been removed, enabling the writer to perceive the comic aspect of attempting
a mental exercise while being physically unable to fulfill it. Visualization cannot
prevent loss of power in the fingers.
Murphy (1977) encounters some unpleasant insects in Gilgit in Pakistan while
on a journey with her six-year-old daughter, as she describes in her book Where the
Indus is Young:
About an inch long, excluding a lot of antennae, they are yellowish-brown and seem, as they
move, to be of a rubbery consistency. They look not unlike a cross between mini-frogs and
maxi-spiders and if I hadn’t observed them before opening my Punial water I might have
mistaken them for a symptom of Central Asian D.T.s” (p. 31).
We can almost sense the writer’s enjoyment of selecting language (once the insects
are out of sight) to exaggerate the effect for the benefit of the armchair follower of
her travels.
More recently, Bryson (2006), writing about his experiences hiking the
Appalachian Trail, muses upon on the perils of meeting up with the purportedly
abundant numbers of ursine denizens that hikers often encounter while slogging out
their miles:
What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course.
Literally s–t myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those
unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties—I daresay it would even give a merry
toot—and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag (p. 53).
He does not paint a very “pretty” picture, but one can nevertheless discern the
cathartic response that vividly underlies his description.
Humor and Superiority
Superiority in humor occurs when the writer extracts humor from encounters with
the inhabitants of the target culture, describing an incident from a stance of superior
knowledge or cultural security and effectively “othering” the target of the joke. The
theory can also be traced to the centuries-old contributions of Aristotle, Plato and
Cicero (Perks, 2012) as well as the later works of Hobbes (1651) in which their
central thesis is that humor derives from a competitive, egocentric perspective where
one is amused at the expense of individuals who are perceived to be socially or
physically inferior to oneself. As Martin (2007) further observes,
Some of the social functions of humour can also be quite aggressive, coercive, and manip-
ulative. Although it is a form of play, humour is not necessarily prosocial and benevolent,
and indeed a good deal of humour involves laughing at the behavior and characteristics of
individuals who are perceived to be different in some way and therefore incongruous (p. 44).
Neuendorf et al. (2011) believe that this type of humor tries “to generate a supe-
riority mechanism in response to potentially humorous stimuli” which include “put-
down humour, satire, sarcasm, self-deprecation, and the display of stupid behaviors”
(p. 11). Lisle (2006) succinctly captures the role of Superiority theory in the travel
writing genre when she surmises that.
Travel writers use comedic strategies to puncture the “swollen head” of their own position -
they ‘play the fool’ in order to poke fun at the sense of superiority enjoyed by their colonial
predecessors….The key shift with humorous narratives is that the subject position of the
travel writer is opened up - they laugh at themselves as they laugh at others (p. 102).
Newby (1983) describes attempting to buy a Janata stove in India to replace a lost
one, with minutes to complete the transaction before the departure of a train, from a
shop proprietor who “seemed to be in some kind of trance”:
I rushed to the window—nothing in it seemed to have been disturbed for ages—and seized
the Janata. It was rusty and covered with dust; but this was no time to bother about trifles
like these. “HOW MUCH IS THIS ARTICLE?” I shrieked.
“Hurry, hurry! What is hurry? Only Sahibs hurry,” he droned. He sounded like a bluebottle.
How I hated him at this moment. I could have murdered him, swatted him; but there was no
time (p. 129).
However, the apparently racist description—reducing the Indian to the status of

an insect—is tempered by Newby’s employment of the stereotype of the impatient
Briton and his use of the word “shrieked,” adding a self-deprecating note and some-
what justifying the proprietor’s remarks. In other ostensibly derogatory examples
(Newby, 1981), a garage mechanic is “a broken-toothed demon of a man” (p. 59),
and customers in a café are “evil-looking men, all of whom seemed to be smitten
with double smallpox” (p. 61).
In Slowly Down the Ganges, Newby (1983) describes traveling with his Italian
wife Wanda, unashamedly using gender differences and the female’s perceived
emotionalism as sources of humor:
I had a row with Wanda. It was about something so ludicrous that after it had been going on
some minutes neither of us could remember the reason: but it was no less bitter for that.
“I shall leave you here,” she said. “Boo-hoo!” (p. 96).
One may ask whether such dialogues, inevitably portraying the Other as a figure of
fun, are in fact acceptable and whether a deeper, more sensitive and accurate portrayal
has been sacrificed for the purpose of raising a laugh. To answer this question,
we should remember that travel literature is, on a primary level, the recording of
experience. Amusing and bizarre incidents are an intrinsic part of travel, and one
could argue that the resulting record should ideally convey immediate impressions,
however irrational or objectionable, while the overall value of travel writing may
lie in the writer’s inclusion of subsequent reflections and conclusions regarding an

encounter, with analysis adding perspective and balance.
We should not forget, as mentioned, that the writer who laughs at the ‘other’ also
frequently tells a joke against him/herself. Another example, also by Newby (1981),
is the ending to A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush in which he describes an encounter
with the renowned desert traveler Wilfred Thesiger, who is also on a mission in
Afghanistan:
‘Let’s turn in,’ he [Thesiger] said.
The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our
air-beds. ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies,’ said Thesiger (p. 248).
It is arguably the spirit in which humor is included that determines whether it is

seen as patronizing and offensive or simply as an acknowledgment of the foibles of
humanity, regardless of race or culture. The tone of the writing will indicate whether
a writer conveys affection or malice and thus whether the reader is drawn to the
humor of the encounter.
However, there is a case for arguing that some travel writing has the potential to
cause misunderstandings and even to perpetuate a colonialist-orientalist mentality,
as propounded by Said (1978) in his landmark work Orientalism. Lisle (2006) asks,
“Why, then, are travelogues still being written in our supposedly ‘enlightened’ age?
And why are they still so popular? If the Empire that sustained travel writing was
dismantled with the various decolonization movements of the twentieth century, why
hasn’t travel writing itself disappeared?” (p. 2) and discusses various answers to this
question offered by current travel writers. It is beyond the scope of this paper to
consider these here, but future research as to the evolution of twenty-first century
travel writing would be an enlightening project.
Humor and Incongruity
Incongruity theory also has its roots in ancient times, but more tangentially than
either Relief or Superiority theories. For example, without explicitly using the term
incongruity, Aristotle, Plato and Cicero make the case that humor can be a product
of a violation of an expected or commonplace outcome such as an unexpected
punch line in a joke (Perks, 2012). The philosopher Beattie (1776) first introduced
the term incongruity to capture the inconsistency mechanism that determines what
is humorous. Later philosophers, such as Kant (1790), Schopenhauer (1818), and
Kierkegaard (1846), developed more refined perspectives on the underpinnings of
humor and incongruity. These works have served to establish an important founda-
tion for the works of contemporary researchers. Moreover, in Gervais and Wilson’s
(2005) examination of the psychology of humor literature, they concluded that the
inherent logic of the incongruity construct has led to its widespread acceptance by
scholars in the field. Their observations are also supported by the findings of Veale
(2004), Kulka (2007), and Smuts (2009).
In a related study, Neuendorf et al. (2010) refer to the “juxtaposition of inconsis-

tent or incongruous elements” as the criterion for incongruity. Humor occurs when a
sense of absurdity is perceived and prompts mirth as a reaction, perhaps to another’s
or one’s own misfortune or lack of foresight. Incongruity can also be defined as the
difference between the anticipation and the reality: a reversal of the expected event.
Similar definitions have been offered in the works of Clark (1970), Berger (1976),
Deckers and Divine (1981), Deckers and Kizer (1975), and McGhee (1979). Addi-
tionally, Meyer (2000) and Warren and McGraw (2015) chronicle the role of incon-
gruity in explaining humor in such diverse, non-comedic contexts as neuroscience
(Bartolo et al., 2006; Goel & Dolan, 2001), marketing (Speck, 1991), and politics
(Young, 2017). Several examples of how events and episodes of travel literature can
be evaluated from the perspective of incongruity are presented below.
Newby (1983), in Slowly Down the Ganges, describes how he “was just about to
eat the first paratha when a dirty, sharp-toothed little dog snatched it out of my hand
and ran off into the night” (p. 107), echoing Ibn Battutah many centuries earlier, who
reported that a hyena “got at my baggage, ripped up a camel-sack…dragged out a
small skin of dates and made off with it” (Mackintosh-Smith, 2001a, 2001b, p. 23).
Linguistic misunderstandings provide humor of the incongruous variety, as in the
following conversation from Mackintosh-Smith’s Travels with a Tangerine (2001):
‘Mr. Mann, what are those pickwickles you’ve been talking about?’
‘You are English,’ said Mr. Mann, surprised, ‘and are not knowing pickwickles? They are
JCBs, artics, etcetera, etcetera.’ ‘“Big vehicles”,’ explained Khamis, who was fluent in
English, Hindi, Urdu and their various mutations (p. 219).
Humor also lies in the difference between the perceptions of speakers. Dalrymple
(1990) records the following conversation with an Arab boy in Syria in his book In
Xanadu:
‘Henry Fielding,’ said Nizar smacking his lips, ‘is the father of your English fiction.’
‘What about Chaucer?’.
‘I do not know this Chaucer. He is older than Henry Fielding?’ ‘Certainly.’
‘And he is good writer?’ ‘Very good’
‘I think you wrong. If Chaucer was good writer I would hear his name on “Kaleidoscope”.
All the good writers they are on “Kaleidoscope”. But never your Mr. Chaucer’ (pp. 46–47).
The humor here lies in the criteria by which each speaker defines a classic work of
literature, particularly as Dalrymple is a university undergraduate at the time. In a
similar example, he is apprehended by the police in Iran and is unable to convince
them that he is not a spy until he is inspired to produce his Cambridge university
library card, only for suspicion to turn to admiration and subservience (1990). We
also see the writer enjoying his authority and creating his own incongruity when
he is asked by an old man in Kashgar how many sheep, donkeys and camels his
“Chairman” owns, and he replies that “’she owns no camels but has very many
horses and a great number of corgi dogs’” (1990, p. 238), knowing that the concept
of owning dogs as pets is outside the experience of his listener.
As stated earlier, while there is a general consensus on the utility and value of
Incongruity theory, critics have observed that there has not been forthcoming a precise
or universally accepted definition of the construct (Forabosco, 1992, and Martin,

2007). This has led to efforts to create a more focused and integrated definition
of the construct. Specifically, building on the work of Veatch (1988), Warren and
McGraw (2010) undertook the development (Snow, 2014) of the theory of Benign
Violation, which will be examined next.
The Theory of Benign Violation
Veatch (1988) observes that the plethora of conceptual frameworks that has emerged
in research on humor has failed to yield a systematic or comprehensive theory of
the phenomenon. He further contends that, in order to achieve such a scientific
perspective, such a theory must reflect the “valid insights of previous thinkers, be
falsifiable, accurate, complete and insightful, and if possible, both simple and useful”
(p. 162). In other words, the theory must be inclusive and comprehensive and able to
minimize Type I and Type II errors (i.e. rejecting a false negative and accepting a false
positive). In his efforts to adhere to the aforementioned characteristics, the author
equates the phenomenon of humor to a cognitive process, which elicits laughter. The
cognitive mechanism that underlies his conceptualization is perceived incongruity.
This mechanism is driven by the “necessary and (jointly) sufficient conditions” of.
V: The perceiver has violation of a ‘subjective moral principle.’ That is,
some affective commitment of the perceiver to the way something in
the Situation ought to be is violated.
N: The perceiver has in mind a predominating view of the Situation as
being normal.
Simultaneity: The N and V understandings are present in the mind of
the perceiver at the same instant in time (Veatch, 1988, p. 163).
Warren and McGraw (2015) present their case for refining and redefining incon-
gruity theory by examining the variables that have been identified and applied in
the incongruity literature. They have identified four different definitions (albeit with
some overlap) in the research that addresses the incongruity construct: surprise, juxta-
position, atypicality, and violation (see Exhibit 1). First, the depiction of incongruity
as a function of surprise or a deviation from that which is expected has been widely
applied in a number of works, for example, Deckers and Kiser (1975). Second,
the construct of juxtaposition was first formally defined by Beattie in 1776 and
further articulated by Rutkowski (2016) with the argument that “humour arises from
the conjunction of incongruous elements, caused by their proximity, similarity, the
causal relationship or contrasting juxtaposition” (p. 130). Other scholars utilizing
this approach in their research include Eysenck (1942), Keith-Spiegel (1972), Monro
(1988), Speck (1991), Attardo and Raskin (1991), and Schopenhauer (1818). Third,
the atypicality construct is similar to the previously discussed notion of surprise
but differs in terms of its primary focus on the inconsistency of actual and perceived
expectations. Attardo (1994), while not explicitly utilizing the term, posits that humor
occurs “when the arrangement of the constituent elements of an event is incom-

patible with normal or expected patterns, [and] the event is perceived as incon-
gruous” (p. 48)—i.e. atypicality. The research of Keith-Spiegel (1972), McGhee
(1979), and Warren and McGraw (2010) is closely related to the utilization of this
approach. Finally, violation is generally viewed as the perception of an inconsistency
in an expected outcome (how things are versus how things should be). Building on
Veatch (1988), Warren and McGraw (2010) define violation as “any stimulus that
seems threatening, wrong or negative” (p. 3). Other researchers directly or indirectly
working with the violation concept include, Attardo and Raskin (1991), Veale (2004),
and Warren and McGraw (2010, 2015).
As Attardo and Raskin (1991) posit, the mechanisms of cognitive stimulus
processing underlie the determination of what is funny and what is not. The perceived
degrees of similarity in “asymmetrical binary relations” (i.e. contrast and differen-
tiation) are at the core of their proposed taxonomy. Veale (2004) concludes that the
assessment of what is benign and humorous is not solely a function of
the contrast itself, but the intrinsic value of the available options, that drives the decision
process, so we need some basis of evaluating these options if their attractiveness as interpre-
tations is to be explained. What is needed is not a logical mechanism as such, or a logic of
oppositions, but a social logic that allows a theory to ground the interpretation in the specific
concerns and prejudices of the listener as a social agent (p. 9).
As stated earlier, Warren and McGraw (2015) utilize the concepts of the afore-
mentioned incongruity and violation researchers to formulate a more complete model
(see Exhibit 1) of Benign Violation theory—one that can be empirically tested. The
authors undertook a research design that encompassed six independent experiments
utilizing the different variables derived from the model in Exhibit 1 and operational-
ized cues conveyed through relevant YouTube videos in a variety of contexts (for
example entertainment, marketing, social settings, and sports). The major conclu-
sions drawn from their investigations of the specified variables are that the simulta-
neous manipulation of benign and violation assessments results in a more efficacious
prediction of humorous versus non-humorous outcomes than with existing theories.
This outcome occurs because, as depicted by the Venn diagram intersecting set1 in
Exhibit 1, benign and violation variables are comprised of scaled affective compo-
nents that serve as moderators of humor. If a stimulus falls outside the center set
of logical outcomes then it is not humorous. On one hand, it is evaluated as too
ordinary or banal, or conversely as too extreme or negative. Despite these promising
contributions to the advancement of humor theory, Warren and McGraw (2015), in
their call for future research, observe that:
despite outperforming alternative conceptualizations.
of incongruity, measures of benign violations in our studies were.
unable to perfectly classify humorous and non-humorous stimuli.
The data showed that the benign violation hypothesis often missed.
characterizing humorous stimuli as humorous, which suggests.
a need for refinement in theory, measurement, or both (p. 19).
The importance of understanding how humor constructs relate and apply to travel
literature is addressed next.
Implications for Travel Literature
As a literary device, the use of humor in fiction is much more flexible than in non-
fiction. The writer’s representation of events, individuals, or cultures is limited only
by his or her creative imagination, whereas the non-fiction writer is more constrained
by the reality of his or her milieu. That being said, the creative presentation of
travel description through metaphors, language, comparisons, and other literary tech-
niques (Buckton-Tucker, 2016) affords ample opportunity to integrate humor. It is
the contention of the author that, if one were to analyse hypothetically the illustrative
vignettes presented earlier in the article through a BVT “lens,” the use of humor could
have been made more effective. For example, if Bryson (2006) selected deer (which
are much more abundant on the Appalachian Trail and much less ferocious) instead
of bears, his description of a potential close encounter would most likely be classi-
fied as highly unrealistic and hence non-humorous. In a similar vein, if Dalrymple
(1990) chose Paul Theroux as his comparative reference instead of Chaucer it would
probably have been perceived as less funny because the reader might assume that
Theroux would hardly be known to Nizar and might not even be a familiar name
to him/herself. Moreover, if Thesiger (1959) had described Newby and Carless as
“namby-pambys” instead of “pansies” (Newby, 1981, p. 248) it might have enhanced
the amusement potential for readers. Again, one must remember that the compre-
hension of humor is idiosyncratic in that it is a function of ego involvement and its
influences. Perceiving “namby-pambys” to be more humorous than “pansies” would
require extensive knowledge of both terms and varied exposure to their usage (to
name just a few possible moderating variables.)
The conceptual framework developed by the author presents a number of future
research opportunities. A partial replication of the Warren and McGraw (2015)
research design using the aforementioned operational measures could be used to
assess the validity of the BVT model and the reliability of the obtained results.
Conclusion
Humor is discussed as an integral part of a wide variety of works of travel literature,

both as regards the process of composition and the reactions of the reader. It may not
be untrue to say that the modern reader has come to expect the benign violation of
passages such as those quoted above in addition to weightier information on history,
geography, sociology, and culture, to name just some of the areas potentially covered
by a work of travel literature. Indeed, they are more than just humorous additions,
serving as cultural indicators in many cases and also ensuring an accessible and lively
work that arouses curiosity in the reader as to the destinations portrayed and a desire
to seek his/her own truths.
Endnotes
1
A Venn diagram is a schematic diagram used in logic theory to depict collections
of sets and represent their relationships. and is mathematically defined as,
n
n
N= = 2n ,
k
k=0

n
where there are (the binomial coefficient) ways to pick k members from a total
k
of n, the number of regions in an order n Venn diagram. http://mathworld.wolfram.
com/VennDiagram.html.
Fig. 18.1 Exhibit 1. Benign violation model. Source Adapted from Warren and McGraw (2015)
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Chapter 19
(Hi)story and Fiction in the Algerian
Novel: Particular Reference to Amin
Zaoui’s Le Miel de la Sieste and Kamel
Daoud’s Meursault Contre-enquête
Azzeddine Bouhassoun
Abstract From Lyotard’s metanarrative to personal biography, in his quest for

“truth,” how does an Algerian author express his will to literary self-assertion, identity
and pure (hi)story—if not a farce—to use Baudrillard’s concept from his Carnival
and Cannibal? Instead of hegemony, Bhabha suggests hybridity that he extends to
include the phase of political change. In this very context, both Zaoui’s novel Le
Miel de la Sieste and Daoud’s Meursault Contre-enquête sit comfortably in this
phase of linguistic and cultural independence and dependence, intellectual quest,
and Cultural alienation. The narrators in both novels suffer from identity disorder in
a post-independent Algeria because of their alienation, absence of father, and/or loss
of mother. Anzar, the protagonist in Zaoui’s novel, invents a world of his and takes
refuge in writing and metafiction in order to establish his own “philosophy” of differ-
ence, hybridity, memory, and nostalgia. Haroun, the protagonist in Daoud’s novel,
does not eschew to enquire personal memory in front of the father’s influence and
point of historical perspective. Thus, avoiding the claim to any metanarrative history,
both narrators substitute it with fictional and metafictional elements to discard the
legitimacy to any hegemonic claim to narrative objectivity using such techniques as
metamorphosis and historical ambiguities but above all western influences.
Keywords Kamel Daoud · History · Hybridity · Identity · Metafiction ·

Postcolonial · Amin Zaoui
Introduction
Both Kamel Daoud and Amin Zaoui try to explore identity and its ambiguities.
However, ambiguity is also connecting bridges between the elements of intertextu-
ality, historical viewpoints, and fiction in their respective novels Meursault Contre-
Enquête (2014) and Le Miel de la Sieste (2014). The latter, being influenced by
Philip Roth’s novel The Breast (1972), uses the theme of metamorphosis; whereas,
A. Bouhassoun (B)
BB University, Ain Temouchent, Algeria
e-mail: azzeddinebouhassoun@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_19
292 A. Bouhassoun
Daoud’s novel is interknitted with Camus’s The Stranger (1942). If Freud’s Oedipus
complex belongs to the western tradition, what is the status of the postcolonial
Oedipus complex in Daoud and Zaoui’s novels?
The investigation led by Haroun offers new perspectives on the crime of the Arab.
He is no longer an anonymous dead Arab as in Camus’s novel, an indigenous, but
he is given a name, Moussa, and an identity; he is Haroun’s full brother. In Zaoui’s
novel Le Miel de la Sieste, the narrator Anzar Afaya was born with an anatomical
defect in his private parts. Caressing them gives him pleasure and sends him back to
his past and his memory in search for his identity. He sees Camus, Senac, Okba the
Arab, and Tarik the Berber, among others. However, schizophrenic Anzar creates all
of his characters. He writes from the bottom of his/her room in a mental asylum, and
s/he tries to reconstruct a world from his visions and hallucinations, mental creations
and fabulations, delusions, and logorrhea.
Metanarrative and History
Bhabha (1994) does not see the return to the past as a mere nostalgia, but rather as a
necessity. It is quite plausible to understand the return to childhood in Zaoui’s novel.
The interaction of Anzar Afaya with his mother and father is suffocating pressure.
“Mon père a décidé de faire de moi ce qu’il a fait de moi.”1 Anzar suffers from the
Oedipus complex. He has an ambivalent relationship with his father, and he blames
him; “il me faisait peur mon père,”2 “je hais mon père,”3 or “je ne lui pardonnerai
jamais cet enfermement.”4
The Oedipus complex culminates in the tyranny of the father. The father’s absence
in Daoud’s novel is stifling. Haroun has nothing but to imagine him. “C’est pourquoi
je me l’imagine toujours sombre, caché dans un manteau ou une djellaba noire,
recroquevillé dans un coin mal éclairé, muet et sans réponse pour moi.”5
The relationship with the mother is ambivalent in both novels. Anzar does not have
much sympathy for his own mother. She is “habitée par un désarroi chronique,”6 and
“en larmes chaque fois qu’elle fixait avec passion mes deux couilles dissemblables.”7
She spends her time crying an effeminate son, Toufik. “Ma mère passait ses jours à
pleurer sur le sort de mon frère ainé, Toufik, qui commençait à porter des vêtements
féminins.”8 Haroun’s relationship with the mother is sensual at first. “Ce qui comptait
surtout dans ces moment-là, c’était cette proximité presque sensuelle avec M’ma.”9
But, paradoxically, he finds pleasure in seeing her suffer. “Je m’en souviens, j’avais
ressenti une étrange jubilation à la voir souffrir réellement, pour une fois.”10 The
reasons for this ambivalent feeling can be found in the arguments between Moussa
and his mother. “[M]on frère en voulait à M’ma pour une raison obscure, et elle se
défendait de manière plus obscure encore.”11 Apparently, prostitution is the reason.
This is at least the girl’s case that Moussa wanted to protect before his death.
The Oedipus complex creates Haroun’s psychological affects and Anzar Afaya’s
anxiety. These identity disorders are precisely the result of a reaction to a postcolonial
condition and a protective vision of identity at the same time. Anzar’s anguish is
19 (Hi)story and Fiction in the Algerian Novel: Particular Reference … 293
marked by his fear of castration and the loss of his virility. “Ainsi, je ne serais jamais
l’homme viril, le futur géniteur tant attendu par la grande famille, capable d’assurer la
filiation des Afaya…je ne dormais plus qu’en les couvant avec précaution et prudence
dans mes deux paumes.”12
From the Oedipus complex to the postcolonial Oedipus, this sense of ambivalence
is well entrenched in a love-hatred-envy relation against the former colonizer, his
intellectual, and his writer. Ambivalence is also a key concept developed by Homi
Bhabha. Indeed, ambivalence as well as hybridity and mimicry show us how the
colonized tries to resist the colonizer. Through these concepts, we come to under-
stand that colonialism is not a notion of the past but that it perpetuates itself in the
present through different political, economic, cultural, and aesthetic voices/channels.
These voices challenge us to reconsider our relations with the colonial heritage in its
linguistic and cognitive dimensions.
Both narrators in their quest for desire and historical truth do not recognize the
“postcolonial mother.” For both of them, all is strange, abnormal, absurd, and so
different from the mother’s intra-uterine life before the rupture. Ambiguity provides
dubious meaning for the mother in such a way the reader does not know whether it
represents independent Algeria or France, the former colonizer.
The absent father is also an unknown father. Imagining him with a western coat or
indigenous djellaba conveys a twofold meaning. In addition to the primary meaning,
it is also a reference to the skepticism toward history and unreliability of both the
French colonial and Algerian metanarrative of history. “Cela a duré presque dix ans,
cette histoire. Je le sais parce que je connais les deux textes par cœur.”13 History is
confined to some linguistic construct, a text, or two texts (deux textes).
History, just like fiction in general and the novel in particular, is a linguistic
construct. Kamel Daoud is aware of it in his quest for truth.
Le meurtrier est devenu célèbre et son histoire est trop bien écrite pour que j’aie dans l’idée
de l’imiter. C’était sa langue à lui. C’est pourquoi je vais faire ce qu’on a fait dans ce pays
après son indépendance : prendre une à une les pierres des anciennes maisons des colons et
en faire une maison à moi, une langue à moi. Les mots du meurtrier et ses expressions sont
mon bien vacant.14
Writing history coincides with fiction while the author gives his metaphorical
opinion on major events of his country. It is the opinion of an elderly man gazing
on his past. History turns out to be not a matter of logic causality, but the product of
emotions, memories, and past events that resist veracity especially when narrated by
an old heavy drinker.
If history shrinks into family past events or a simple biography, the narrator
complies by the rules of interpretation. Haroun is aware of it, and his articulation
of history is one simple drop of consciousness in this vast realm of meaning. It has
taken Haroun years to realize that he cannot resolve the mystery of history, the crime,
or his brother’s murder. Old age is the knowledge pot to collect all moments of past
history, and yet it is not enough to understand anything.
Pardonne au vieillard que je suis devenu. C’est d’ailleurs un grand mystère. Aujourd’hui, je
suis si vieux que je me dis souvent, les nuits où les étoiles sont nombreuses à scintiller dans
294 A. Bouhassoun
le ciel, qu’il y a nécessairement quelque chose à découvrir quand on vit aussi longtemps.
Autant d’efforts à vivre! Il faut qu’au bout, nécessairement, il y ait une sorte de révélation
essentielle. Cela me choque, cette disproportion entre mon insignifiance et la vastitude du
monde. Je me dis souvent qu’il doit y avoir quelque chose, quand même, au milieu, entre
ma banalité et l’univers!15
History and metaphysics are mere linguistic constructs to soothe the ego of a nation
or a community, but no one can check the veracity of their narratives. Consequently,
fiction and metafiction are the sole substitutes. Each individual can interpret history
or metaphysics according to his own understanding. Knowledge becomes relative
to the old man, and chasing the father from the narrative universe dismisses the
metaphysical realm as well.
Anzar has a similar position toward religion. “Depuis que j’étais à l’école, je
déteste les discours religieux!”16 He does not have any respect for a sacred place when
he kisses Malika on the steps of a mosque. “Embrasser Malika sur les marches d’une
mosquée est un scandale diabolique. Je suis, à ses yeux, la source de la malédiction
qui ne tardera pas à nous tomber sur la tête.”17 The malediction or curse, in this
context, is to be banned from tha collective community they belong to as a natural
consequence to the loss of the collective religious vision.
Faithful to the oedipal rebellion, Haroun tries to subtract himself from his complex
of inferiority. A crime against a crime, he was dreaming to commit one. Writing a
novel becomes a crime “Ah, tu sais, moi qui pourtant ne me suis jamais soucié d’écrire
un livre, je rêve d’en commettre un. Juste un !”.18
The dissolution of the ego is the consequence of fear and anxiety in the devel-
opment process of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus, who is always in quest for
the mother in the outer world, does not have a strong consciousness of identity and
reality. Consequently, Haroun attempts to free himself from the strong hold of his
spiritual father’s influence “C’est d’ailleurs pour cette raison que j’ai appris à parler
cette langue et à l’écrire; pour parler à la place d’un mort, continuer un peu ses
phrases.”19
Aware of cultural, artistic and literary challenges, Haroun asks, “Comment dire
ça à l’humanité quand tu ne sais pas écrire de livres?”20 He confirms the novel’s
belonging to Western epistemology and to the colonizer. He also denounces the fact
that the novel of which he speaks ignores the other and does not even mention the
name of the assassinated Arab.
Daoud uses metafiction as a hybrid technique in order to approach the represen-
tation of reality. Therefore, the inception of this vision to the outer world starts from
the form/body since identity and form take a single hybrid body. Identity determines
the form that shapes the novel, the language, the register, and the conception of the
world.
Metafiction, according to Waugh (2001), introduces a conflict between voices,
characters, and the demiurge writer. In Daoud’s novel, it opens on the murder of
a character, the same individual reported in Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942).
In the chaos of comings and goings to Camus’s The Stranger, of which the author
adapts entire passages, the confusion of words and polysemy create another murder.
In fact, it is the author of our novel who is the murderer. The narrator incriminates
him. It is no longer Camus’s novel but Daoud’s novel. He is “l’ecrivain tueur,”21 “ton
écrivain, semblait m’avoir volé … mon portrait, et même les détails de ma vie et les
souvenirs de mon interrogatoire!”22 He is confused with the murderer in Camus’s
novel because the layers of narration become one in Daoud’s novel “Ton écrivain
meurtrier s’est trompé, mon frère et son compagnon n’avaient pas du tout l’intention
de les tuer, lui ou son ami barbeau.”23
Daoud uses a few other hybrid techniques of oral tradition coupled with metafic-
tion in order to convince, persuade and play on the emotions of the reader. “Cela fait
des années que je t’attends et si je ne peux pas écrire mon livre, je peux au moins te
le raconter, non?”.24
The quest for identity generates this movement between the real and the unreal
in perfect hybridity. A slide in both worlds takes place through words. If our novels
are inspired by historical reality, they remain a simple work of fiction only. The
elements of history, however, produce a certain causality even if the historical fact is
not integrated in its totality. Aesthetically, the graft is accepted to create innovations
in the field of writing. History has no longer a frontier with the unreal. It is a simple
construction among so many others open to multiple interpretations and without
“eternal truths,” as Waugh puts it in her book Metafiction, the theory and practice of
self-conscious fiction (2001).25
Pure and impure is no longer recognizable, and metafiction is part of the narrative
structure of fiction itself “metafiction becomes indistinguishable from the fiction tout
court.” (Krysinski, 2002, p. 186) 26 The transformation or metamorphosis of the two
narrative systems is a hybridization of two discourses, an impurity, a third voice. The
pure and the impure become indivisible because the impurity touches even the city
which was rather pure and became impure after independence.
Metafiction, Identity, and Truth
For Waugh (2001), “the lowest common denominator of metafiction is simultane-

ously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction.”27
Daoud uses this technique to shed light on his story and his conception of the Algerian
history.
From the beginning, one has the impression that Daoud’s novel is about an indi-
vidual in a bar who tells a story to a student. Camus’s novel and the narrator’s story
become one and overlap until the narrator uses masks according to his desires defying
the author and confesses in complete freedom “Je pouvais passer de vie à trépas et de
l’au-delà au soleil en changeant seulement de prénom: moi Haroun, Moussa, Meur-
sault ou Joseph. Selon les envies, Presque.”28 When he speaks of the “book,” the
narrator deliberately creates confusion and we no longer know whether the referent
is his own novel or that of Camus.
Metafiction, therefore, introduces intertextuality but at the same time confesses
a technique to exhume an emotion and a consciousness of the narrator by involving
296 A. Bouhassoun
his reader. It is also another challenging gaze on history, and a rebellion against the
father.
The colonizer’s position is reinforced by his identity but above all by his “superior-
ity” over the colonized. The latter dreams to imitate the colonizer’s literary produc-
tion, but his inability to detach himself from his ex-colonizer drives him toward
mimicry. It becomes a manner to express, in a similar way, a meaning. Haroun
travels from layers of narration in a way to overlap the novelist’s position this time,
understands his role and accepts his status of a victimized former colonized without
seemingly apparent resistance. Yet, mimesis helps him to develop his own identity.
The colonizer’s discourse radicalizes the polarity between the superior West and
the inferior East that Edward Said undertook in his Orientalism (1978), and Bhabha
finds in Said’s work a support for his discourse of hybridity rather than polarity.
The novel, according to Bhabha, is precisely a tool that marks Western superiority.
However, ironically it also marks the resistance of the colonized. Daoud also rein-
forces the idea by showing that the criminal wants to confirm that the European is
clearly superior to the Arab, who remains unnamed in Camus’s novel. It is only by
giving him a life, an identity, a family, and a name, Moussa, that Daoud rejects this
superiority. Haroun knows it bitterly because “[a]près l’Indépendance, plus je lisais
les livres de ton héros, plus j’avais l’impression d’écraser mon visage sur la vitre
d’une salle de fête où ni ma mère ni moi n’étions conviés. Tout s’est passé sans
nous.”29
Haroun wants a compromise, a negotiation, a rejection of polarity and difference
through aesthetic devices such as hybridity. He has nothing left but anger to show
the attitude of Camus’s hero. This anger is aesthetically carried out. Metafiction is
the only way to rebel against the “father,” to assert his will to life and his will to
annihilate the metanarrative of the European. Mimicry helps to erect a new world
although impurely similar to the original, an artifact.
Anzar in Zaoui’s novel is so excited with his “spiritual father” that he makes a
source for desire to bait women. Just like Haroun above, he thinks that his story is
an endless rewriting of history. “Moi-même, je commence à apprécier mes propres
histoires, celles que je construis pendant la nuit. Le jour, je démonte. Le soir, je
remonte.je m’amuse avec si peu, avec rien.”30
This opinion is not always of his own construct as the influence of the spiritual
father, Camus in this case, is omnipresent. The same dialectical relation existing in
the Oedipus complex regulates the hate-admiration feelings. This ambivalent feeling
toward the father creates the ambiguities and the chaotic entanglements of the narra-
tive. Haroun shapes hi(s) tory in a variety of techniques pertaining to metafiction.
According to Waugh (2001), some of these are.
dehumanization of character, parodic doubles, obtrusive proper names…, self-reflexive
images …, critical discussions of the story within the story…, continuous undermining
of specific fictional conventions…, use of popular genres …, and explicit parody of previous
texts whether literary or non-literary.31
In her major book, Metafiction (2001), Waugh defines the concept as a self-
conscious writing about fiction and its relation to reality. Exploring the theory of
fiction and its construction, “such writings not only examine the fundamental struc-
tures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world
outside the literary fictional text.”32
Metafiction intrudes as a game and a play; it displays the narrator’s self-reflexivity.
It is consciousness of the narrative mode and the intertextual dialogue between at
least Daoud and Camus’s novels. On one hand, it sounds like an oral story told by a
man in a bar to whoever wants to listen to him. He is an old man who brings pieces
of memory, assumptions, facts based on family and personal events in a chaotic
nonlinear sequencing. On the other hand, the ludic principle does not offer that much
importance to the ideas that history puts forth. Metafiction tries to set Haroun on a
personal, empiric experience of past events, and very often-introspective enquiries
about “truth(s)” and the self, history, and the present. The quest for “truth” about
the crime is intermingled, but which truth since there are varieties of truths. This
incredulity toward metanarratives is simplified into a “vulgar” crime committed in
both novels, i.e., Daoud and Camus’s, but apparently, Haroun incriminates his own
mother “J’en veux à ma mère, je lui en veux. C’est elle qui a commis ce crime en
vérité.”33 However, of this crime, he confesses that his mother had thousands of
stories which veracities did not interest him. Each has his own interpretation of a
past event, but ultimately even Haroun has his own “La vérité est que l’Indépendance
n’a fait que pousser les uns et les autres à échanger leurs rôles.”34 The reader himself
can create several interpretations of the novel depending on the perspective. It is an
investigation of a crime, an unsuccessful love story, and an existentialist interpretation
of life in postcolonial Algeria. The only truth that remains is his and his conception
of it, hi(s) story, and the world around him.
It is important then to claim that the role of metafiction is pinning identity to
narrative and fiction. The personal self-reflexivity and self-consciousness appear
to be elements of self-identity. The two cultures remain in contact, and language
creates and invents the identity that depends on a back and forth movement between
the former colonizer and the colonized’s novel, therefore culture. The narrator speaks
of hybridity in a relational context. It can be political, cultural, and social. He calls
it “justice’ or ‘equilibrium.”
Comprends-moi bien, je n’exprime ni tristesse ni colère. Je ne joue même pas le deuil,
seulement…seulement quoi? Je ne sais pas. Je crois que je voudrais que justice soit faite.
Cela peut paraître ridicule à mon âge… Mais je te jure que c’est vrai. J’entends par là, non
la justice des tribunaux, mais celle des équilibres.35
For Bhabha, colonialism should not be seen as a negative factor in the history of
nations but as a period of cultural and intellectual contact. From the matrix of violence
and domination culture is born, not without continuity. Decolonization does not occur
in peace and serenity. But it is an endless process from which certain spasms are to
be revisited and meditated. Identity is no longer of that ideal purity that some venture
to seek in the meanders of history because it flows between the cultural interactions
bequeathed by the colonizer and the local culture; it is the fruit of this negotiation.
The linguistic problem in post-colonial Algeria remains one of the thorniest and
its complexity is obscured between the ideology of a nascent, developing country
298 A. Bouhassoun
seeking a place in the concert of the nations of the world, and a language that imposes
both a vision and a meaning. Haroun admits it. Language has an erotic dimension
and so does memory especially when it reveals its perfidy and inability to bring truth
from the past. Identity then becomes fluid, swerving between mental representations
and linguistic constructs. “Je suis le frère de Moussa ou le frère de personne. Juste
un mythomane que tu as rencontré pour remplir tes cahiers…”.36
Haroun recognizes his state of neuroticism “J’ai une vision de névrosé, je te
l’accorde.”37 What is troubling in the novel is the dissolution of the ego. For Waugh
(2001), paranoia establishes a new contact with reality and is a celebration of
new forms of narration. This deconstruction of the real gives the reader a better
understanding of the narrative.
This is also the hell fruit of the narrator’s schizophrenia. Haroun, speaking of the
other, another “himself” at the end of the novel is obvious. This other does not exist
in the “real” world, but Haroun creates individuals starting with his brother Moussa
“J’avais des voix dans la tête. C’était peut-être Moussa qui parlait.”38 Characters do
not exist outside the narrator’s head. Moussa is none other than Haroun. “Il tremblait
de peur devant ma résurrection alors qu’il avait dit au monde entier que j’étais mort
sur une plage d’Alger!”.39
The schizophrenic theme is an original technique that invites the other in the
realm of disorder and confusion as a “legitimate” double, another self, with whom
the narrator must compose to recover his hybrid identity. Hybridity is precisely erotic
in its essence because it brings together antagonisms and opposites, irreconcilable
and incompatible. Haroun, evoking his feminine principle, also experiences it with
Meriem, a character that flows straight out of his delirium in his quest for erotic
hybridity “Pendant que nous nous regardions avec une curiosité nouvelle, inaugurée
par le désir des corps, elle m’a dit: ‘Je suis plus brune que toi.’”40 Just like Moussa,
Meriem does not exist of course. Everything Haroun relates about her, the scene, the
encounter, and even the declaration of boneless love of words happens to be a lie,
“un bobard. De bout en bout. La scène est trop parfaite, j’ai tout inventé.”41
The “word” of the schizophrenic that reports history does reflect the referent, the
real, so what about history when reported through memories? “Le mot chez moi est
flou et imprécis.”42 Haroun shows the arbitrariness of the sign when he informs us
of his conception of language. The novel becomes a field of multiple hermeneutics
where history, philosophy, politics, and religion coexist to create an identity and give
meaning to life.
If the novels are inspired from a historical “reality,” they remain only a mere
fiction. Daoud’s narrator rejects the murder as a whole, but the reminiscence of the
texture returns to the original text, a past and a philosophy “La vérité est que je l’ai
déjà fait. À six reprises… Oui, j’y suis allé six fois, sur cette plage. Mais je n’ai
jamais rien retrouvé, ni douilles ni traces de pas, ni témoins, ni sang séché sur le
rocher. Rien.”43
Metafiction explains this in-between between purity and impurity. Daoud’s novel
reads as a criticism of Camus’s novel as impure, but at the same time as a critique of
our own novel.
Again, one has not to seek for purity since impurity affects all fields of activities
even writing. Daoud’s narrator knows well that his story cannot equal the original one.
Haroun’s voice echoes Borges’ ideas that a book is written somewhere, in another
language, another culture and that his work was precisely to criticize this invented
work.
Haroun thinks that his novel was written in another language and culture. “Cela
a mené à une sorte de livre étrange—que j’aurais peut-être dû écrire d’ailleurs, si
j’avais eu le don de ton héros.”44
Metafiction reminds us that the project of modernity fades, and that the literary
text reflects a double vision: that of the colonizer whose image is reflected in the
production of the colonized. The latter disturbs the vision of the colonizer. The
literary text of the colonized awakens the demons of the former colonizer and his
colonial origins.
The foundations of the traditional novel are shaken concepts with the advent of
metafiction. All is fragmentation, illusion and unreal, opacity and polysemy. Even
“truth” is only a stylistic effect as Waugh asserts.
In the confusion, time splits between two periods in both novels: that of Algeria
before independence and the present postcolonial era. Liminality and hybridity,
precisely, refer to space and time describing people in different stages of conscious-
ness, development, or evolution. Time seems to have its own reading, culture, and
apprehension of the outside world. Thus, in Zaoui’s novel (2014), Anzar narrates his
own “novel,” “his”(s)tory, in disorder “En désordre, je raconte.”45 In other words,
in disorder, I tell/narrate life in a village that is archaic and outside of history. He
starts his novel/narration with the howls of a wolf at night “C’est la tombé de la nuit,
je hurle comme un loup égaré dans un désert sourd,”46 to end barking like a dog “et
j’ai aboyé très fort !”.47
In both novels, identity joins the form in its chaotic and hybrid aspects. Confession
is part of self-identification through alcohol or masturbation. This is at least the case
in Zaoui’s novel “Si je ne me caressais pas les couilles, je n’arriverais jamais à me
rappeler mon passé… le centre de la mémoire se trouve dans les testicules.”48 It is the
reason why time is eroticized “ce tic magique, capable de me remonter le temps,”49
and everything embraces past and present, in total confusion or even anarchy to better
assuage the idea of irrationality that manages space or even the novel.
Just like Haroun, Anzar seems a heavy drinker too. All his characters are the
product of his fantasies. Anzar is positioned in the same trajectory of his delusions,
logorrhea, and hallucinations. “En faisant l’amour à l’ambassadrice, il ne voyait plus
rien dans la chambre. Tout a disparu. ‘La chambre a sombré dans l’obscurité. J’ai
crié. Elle aussi. Il n’y avait plus de Président ni d’allocution officielle. Ni de langue
nationale germanique. Nos deux corps parlaient une autre langue. Celle du Plaisir.”50
Hybridity between real and unreal challenges the narrative linearity where the begin-
ning, the end, the linear plot are no longer necessary to understand the linguistic and
the external “real” world. Everything happens in the head of the narrator, as in a
dream.
Anzar is kept hostage of his own delirium “Dès que je caresse mes billes … les
évènements jaillissent dans ma tête, défilent devant mes yeux. Je délire juste.”51 It is
300 A. Bouhassoun
obvious that the reader is solely responsible for the reconstruction and reconstruction
of meaning by creating the whole from the fragments. Time and space suffer, and the
reader gets lost in the play of words and games of meanings. The binary structure
signifying/signified has no longer any meaning. Is that not why Anzar rejects De
Saussure? “J’ai toujours pense que la matrice de toute langue se trouve dans les
couilles. Les langues naissent et se développent à l’intérieur des testicules et pas sur
la langue ou dans le cerveau comme l’affirmait Ferdinand de Saussure. Au diable,
De Saussure et ses théories.”52
From these fragments, postcolonial literature shapes a hideous and often non-
hospitable space that the narrator rejects. Indeed, neither Algiers nor Bab El Kamar
pleases Anzar. ‘Alger ville de pirates,’53 or when he asks ‘Mais pourquoi est-ce que
je reviens dans ce village des mouches bleues.’54 Space does not alleviate tensions,
and it is not a terrain to absorb the crises of hybridity.
Zaoui uses metafiction to tell us about his novel. It is a sort of mirror for Anzar
who rejects his image “Je déteste les miroirs. J’évite de croiser le reflet de ma gueule
de chien enragé.”55 Anzar sheds light on his consciousness on the subject “Je tourne
les pages de mon histoire qui ressemble à un livre et se lit en sens inverse ou à la
verticale, peu importe.”56 Discourse becomes an object of analysis, and the author
plays with the words and with the sense “metafiction should be taken as both as both
manifestation of deconstruction and of a cognitive process.”57 He criticizes the text,
his own or another’s, offers an interpretation and approach to the “truth” of the text
or even metaphysics.
Zaoui summarizes Philip Roth’s The Breast (1972) and criticizes it as well.
“Le Sein de Philip Roth est l’histoire d’un universitaire, professeur de littérature
comparée, qui s’est métamorphosé en sein! À travers cette mutation, Philip Roth
décrit l’origine du désir humain, sa genèse.”58
The parricide gives free rein to his delirium, logorrhea, to the point where he feels
invested with a divine mission. Thus, Anzar thinks he is a prophet, “j’ai pensé à mes
quarante ans, l’âge de la révélation et de la raison, que je clôture aujourd’hui,”59 the
resurrected Christ.
Metafiction suggests several writing techniques so as to explore the contemporary
world and the writer’s experience. Starting from personality troubles, paranoia and
schizophrenia are the most characteristic. Our author experiences some of these
techniques. We will approach some of them.
Hybridity, Metamorphosis and Genre
“Suis-je la fille de mon père Wardane ou de mon oncle Anzar Afaya el-Kebir.”60 Such
is the complexity of the quest for identity in Anzar Afaya. Moreover, the reader has
the impression that Toufik the effeminate does not exist although his mother weeps
after his death. “Ainsi j’étais devenu le mort vivant. J’habitais la peau d’un mort
pour traverser ma vie de vivant, en vivant… devenu le fils de mon oncle Wardane
Afaya.”61 Homosexuality is a trait that must be noted in the passage of Zaoui’s work.
The first touch by the village hairdresser shocks Anzar. He feels fear, but likes it
and since that moment he chose to be a hairdresser. He ultimately lived with Senac,
perhaps his lover, before he was assassinated. Zaoui’s next passage casts doubt:
Quand il m’a recueilli, je n’étais qu’un petit chiot de deux mois. Il habitait une cave humide
pleine de livres, de revues, de magazines et de journaux. À l’aube, de retour de ses retournées
nocturnes dans les bars, mon maître me lisait, d’une voix forte et chantante, des poèmes qui
faisaient l’éloge de l’autogestion et de la révolution socialiste de Ben Bella. On mangeait
dans la même assiette en plastique…Quand, en cette nuit du 29 au 30 Aout 1973, je l’ai
aperçu gisant dans son sang, lâchement assassiné, je n’ai pu retenir mes larmes. Oui, j’ai
pleuré. Il avait été trahi par l’un de ces amants. Il aimait les hommes et les garçons. Le
lendemain de son enterrement dans le cimetière de Ain Benian, j’ai décidé de quitter Alger.
Et je ne sais plus comment, après de longues tribulations, je suis arrivé jusqu’ici, dans ce
centre psychiatrique de la banlieue d’Oran.62
Anzar will create a woman to complement him as an androgynous being. This

is Malika. “Ensemble, Malika et moi, jouions à des jeux tantôt féminins, tantôt
masculins. Et nous étions heureux.”63 Malika is none other than his female principle.
They share the same body “Dès qu’elle commence à caresser mes boules, Malika
se souvient précisément de mon rêve.”64 This idea of androgyny has an aura of
homosexuality not well hidden especially when Anzar speaks of his relationship
with Senac with whom he lived under the same roof, a kind of concubinage. The
androgynous, homosexual or effeminate eliminates the difference between the sexes
and the genres. It is a form of sexual hybridity.
From the choice of the narrator’s name, the construction of identity makes its way
into a labyrinth of non-normative sexualities such as incest, bestiality, gerontophilia,
and homosexuality. Hybridity continues through metamorphoses into dogs or wolves.
Anzar is even pleased with his new dog’s body. “Malika était contente de me voir
métamorphosé en chien,”65 just as he was happy to be Senac’s puppy of, his master.
The absurd refers to dehumanization. Nicknames are assigned to him “lahmar,” the
donkey,66 has large ears in reference to the donkey, it feels the “bouc, the goat,”
67
he is the “renard,” the fox, “je me suis métamorphosé en une forêt d’animaux
sauvages!”.68
Hybridity is used to defend a culture that is an extension of colonial culture in a
quest for modernity. Identity is no longer static but it is always moving and changing,
plural, contrary to what the father wants to do with Anzar.
Anzar/Malika ends up in a psychiatric facility. For Waugh (2001), paranoia estab-
lishes a new contact with reality and is a celebration of new forms of narration. This
deconstruction of the real gives the reader a better understanding of the narrative.
Metafictional deconstruction has not only provided novelists and their readers with a better
understanding of the fundamental structures of narrative; it has also offered extremely accu-
rate models for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction,
an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems.69
For his part, Bhabha (1994) conceives of hybridity as a shift from the level of
colonized to a perpetual and almost paranoid questioning of the state of power and
authority, their representation, and their presence.
302 A. Bouhassoun
Two points need to be remembered now. Haroun is the Abel of the story. He is
the one that the Frenchman murdered. Only through love does he resurrect. He is a
zombie in quest for love. In fact, after a tumultuous relation with the mother, Haroun
is unable to create healthy love relations. Meriem, his mental creation, is the only
woman who resuscitates him “Dans ma vie, la seule histoire qui ressemble un peu à
une histoire d’amour est celle que j’ai vécue avec Meriem.”70 Meriem is Haroun’s
only dream of a post-independence woman full of passion, fresh, young, and full of
dreams and ambitions. She is brave to stand in front of his mother’s will but then has
to submit, and their relation dilutes through time. “[e]lle a cessé de m’écrire et tout
s’est dilué.”71
The metaphor of love is also a metaphor of death, life, and resurrection “Elle
est la seule femme qui ait trouvé la patience de m’aimer et de me ramener à la
vie.”72 However, just like a zombie or a ghost, Haroun is marginal in his own society
after independence, “J’ai vécu comme une sorte de fantôme observant les vivants
s’agiter dans un bocal.”73 There is some sort of nostalgia for a certain culture, and
an ambivalent feeling toward what the colonizer erected in terms of culture and
civilization on the one hand, and the inability of his own people to remain on the
same path of modernity on the other hand. Language stands for this lost culture
“Le pays est d’ailleurs jonché de mots qui n’appartiennent plus à personne et qu’on
aperçoit sur les devantures des vieux magasins, dans les livres jaunis, sur des visages,
ou transformés par l’étrange créole que fabrique la décolonisation.”74
Likewise, the idea of resurrection is omnipresent in Zaoui’s novel. “[D]epuis ce
jour, j’ai décidé d’enterrer Anzar Afaya, le mort en moi. Qu’il repose en paix!”75
and likewise he falls in love with Malika, “Malika, ma cousine ou ma soeur,
qu’importe.”76 It is a forbidden love that no one accepted in the family.
It is yet important to mention Baudrillard (1996) here since he argues that moder-
nity is the fatality that the whites want to impose on the world. But the logic of
modernity is that the white wants to impose it on the whole world, that the fatum
of the whites should be that of the race of Cain, and that no one should escape this
homogenization, this mystification of the species. In opposition to the metaphor of
“cannibalism” developed by Baudrillard (2008), Daoud’s narrator is aware of his
limits as a “writer.” On the other hand, he is conscious of his state of zombie “[c]ette
histoire, c’est un cadavre qui l’a écrite, pas un écrivain,”77 he still cannot admit his
status as a dying-reviving creature, a zombie, and thus embodies the famous solemn
Mass of Recife, Brazil, in the sixteenth century, mentioned by Baudrillard, where “les
évêques venus tout exprès du Portugal pour célébrer leur conversion passive, sont
dévorés par les Indiens—par excès d’amour évangélique.”78 This excess of fatherly
love distorts, if not history, space and art, their vision to them.
The fear to imitate the father, which is peculiar to the Oedipus complex, reveals this
ambivalent feeling. Indeed, the father “[Il] écrit si bien que ses mots paraissent des
pierres taillées par l’exactitude même,”79 or “Il semble utiliser l’art du poème pour
parler d’un coup de feu!”80 However, now, Haroun is incapable of recreating a story,
but he dreams of it “Ah, tu sais, moi qui pourtant ne me suis jamais soucié d’écrire un
livre, je rêve d’en commettre un.”81 Writing bears connotations with violence. It is
probably the act of cannibalism. He has learned the language to defend his deceased
brother Moussa. It is perhaps clear and legitimate to believe that Daoud thinks he
does not have the same gift as his literary father. But he knows he does not have the
means “J’aurais été bien inspiré d’écrire tout ce que j’avais inventé alors, mais je
n’en avais pas les moyens.”82 As an artist-zombie, Haroun digests all the cultural and
aesthetic innovations without being aware of his cannibalistic condition, The narrator
himself confesses that the language of the colonizer becomes his after independence
since “[l]es mots du meurtrier et ses expressions sont mon bien vacant.”83
From the textual tapestry of the novel to his brother’s body, identity is fluid and
unable to find stability. Crime, violence, and death engulf the narrator in an almost
schizophrenic quest for identity. Thus, he keeps looking for his national identity
while wondering about his brother’s body or perhaps his.
Dans le tas, personne ne s’est demandé quelle était la nationalité de Moussa. On le désignait
comme l’Arabe, même chez les Arabes. C’est une nationalité, “Arabe”, dis-moi? Il est où,
ce pays que tous proclament comme leur ventre, leurs entrailles, mais qui ne se trouve nulle
part?84
Yet, the verb is not enough to live or even survive. Haroun enshrines the end of
all ideals through metafiction after the collapse of his love. In fact, for Haroun, love
is the only ground to genuine identity.
Conclusion
In their quest for identity, both Daoud and Zaoui re-evaluate the metanarrative
of French colonialism as a civilizing institution when time was orderly, whereas,
their postcolonial fiction is a disorderly set of events. After the death of the father,
Kamel Daoud explores the issues of identity starting from the body, his brother’s or
probably his, to reach national identity. Similarly, Zaoui explores identity through
metamorphosis and sexuality.
It is clear that our authors try, through hybridity, metamorphosis and metafiction, to
lay the foundations of differences and to erase them, to correct the identity between
past and present and to present a new identity that transgresses all political and
ideological taboos, socio-cultural and linguistic to move toward modernity. It is in
multiplicity that unity resides.
Hybridity precisely tends to eradicate the polarization of the ego and the other.
Through metafiction, the Algerian postcolonial novel becomes an artistic response
to the Western novel in general and the French one in particular. The Algerian novel
of French expression does not incriminate the French colonizer. It paints a picture of
304 A. Bouhassoun
postcolonial Algeria. It opens a new page, that of metafiction, to initiate a dialogue

with the other and a dialogue through introspection.
Notes
1. Zaoui, Le miel de la sieste, 71.

2. Zaoui, 139.
3. Zaoui, 189.
4. Zaoui, 172.
5. Daoud, meusault contre-enquête, 11.
6. Zaoui, 09.
7. Zaoui, 10.
8. Zaoui, 23.
9. Daoud, 13.
10. Daoud, 35.
11. Daoud, 10.
12. Zaoui, 09.
13. Daoud, 63.
14. Daoud, 07.
15. Daoud, 72.
16. Zaoui, 103.
17. Zaoui, 71.
18. Daoud, 53.
19. Daoud, 07.
20. Daoud, 12.
21. Daoud, 50.
22. Daoud, 69.
23. Daoud, 35.
24. Daoud, 09.
25. Waugh, 07.
26. Krysinski, 186.
27. Waugh, 06.
28. Daoud, 56.
29. Daoud, 37.
30. Zaoui, 145.
31. Waugh, 22.
32. Waugh, 02.
33. Daoud, 50.
34. Daoud, 11.
35. Daoud, 09.
36. Daoud, 75.
37. Daoud, 62.
38. Daoud, 43.
39. Daoud, 50.
40. Daoud, 70.
41. Daoud, 70.

42. Daoud, 68.
43. Daoud, 33.
44. Daoud, 64.
45. Zaoui, 174.
46. Zaoui, 09.
47. Zaoui, 197.
48. Zaoui, 16.
49. Zaoui, 16.
50. Zaoui, 42.
51. Zaoui, 16.
52. Zaoui, 06.
53. Zaoui, 18.
54. Zaoui, 09.
55. Zaoui, 17.
56. Zaoui, 69.
57. Krysinski, 189.
58. Zaoui, 143.
59. Zaoui, 32.
60. Zaoui, 75.
61. Zaoui, 32.
62. Zaoui, 40.
63. Zaoui, 69.
64. Zaoui, 71.
65. Zaoui, 81.
66. Zaoui, 28.
67. Zaoui, 45.
68. Zaoui, 38.
69. Waugh, 09.
70. Daoud, 39.
71. Daoud, 39.
72. Daoud, 39.
73. Daoud, 72.
74. Daoud, 07.
75. Zaoui, 23.
76. Zaoui, 70.
77. Daoud, 08.
78. Baudrillard, 03.
79. Daoud, 07.
80. Daoud, 07.
81. Daoud, 53.
82. Daoud, 64.
83. Daoud, 07.
84. Daoud, 72.
306 A. Bouhassoun
Bibliography
Baudrillard, J. (1996, 2008). The perfect crime. London: Verso. Carnaval et Cannibale. Paris:
L’Herne.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.
Daoud, K. (2014). Meursault Contre-enquête. Paris: Actes Sud.
Fanon, F. (1952). Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
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Ray (Ed.), A Companion to postcolonial studies (pp. 72–86). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing
Ltd.
Huddart, D. (2006). Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Routledge.
Krysinski, W. (2002). Literary philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco. In C. K. Jorge, & J. E.
Gracia (Eds.), Borges, Calvino, Eco: The philosophies of metafiction (pp. 185–204). New York:
Routeledge.
Waugh, P. (2001). Metafiction, the theory and practice of self-conscious fiction. Taylor & Francis
e-Library.
Zaoui, A. (2014). Le Miel de la Sieste. Alger: Barzakh.
Chapter 20
What Does It Mean to Be a “Global”
Text?: The Example of Frankenstein
Cyrus R. K. Patell
In 2014, the Kult Gallery in Singapore invited 24 artists from around the world to
participate in an exhibition called “The Frankenstein Freak Show,” asking them to
riff on the iconography surrounding Frankenstein’s creature. A promotional blurb
from the show pitched the project this way:
Scars and stitches, the green tint on his skin, and the grim look on his face—it’s Frankenstein.
Whether or not you’ve read the Mary Shelly classic, Frankenstein is a grotesque creature
we’ve all come to know. However, what does Frankenstein represent? The relationship
between a parent and child, or a symbol for the outcast? Whatever your interpretation, it
can be agreed on that we all view Frankenstein slightly differently from the next person
(Nookmag, n.p.).
Implicit in this description is the idea that “Frankenstein,” originally the creation
of the English novelist Mary Shelley, has now become a piece of global cultural
heritage, the name recognizable in locales far from London where the novel was first
published in 1818.
Just what is it, however, that “Frankenstein” signifies? Is it Shelley’s novel? Or
James Whale’s 1931 film adaptation? Or is it a character—perhaps not even the
scientist named “Frankenstein” in the novel, but rather the “creature” that he creates?
Is it a particular image of that creature? Or is it just an idea, born in a novel, but
transformed into something both simpler and much bigger? Writing about the show
for the website We Heart, Rob Wilkes confessed to never having read Shelley’s novel
and to only making it halfway through Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation starring
Robert DeNiro. “By osmosis,” Wilkes added, “I already knew that Frankenstein is
the name of the scientist and not the monster, who doesn’t have a name except,
referring to God’s creation of man, he likens himself to Adam. I also know why the
monster never had children. It’s because his nuts were in his neck. Ba-dum tish” (n.p.).
Wilkes’s joke relies on the idea that many of his readers will have a particular image
C. R. K. Patell (B)
New York University, New York, NY, USA
e-mail: cp1@nyu.edu
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0_20
308 C. R. K. Patell
Fig. 20.1 Boris Karloff as

“The Monster” in James
Whales’s The Bride of
Frankenstein (1935)
Fig. 20.2 Image by Ben

Frost from The Frankenstein
Freak Show, Kult Gallery,
Singapore August 2014
of “Frankenstein” in their heads, the one associated with Boris Karloff’s portrayal of
the creature in Whale’s 1931 film and its sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
(Fig. 20.1).
One image from the show, created by the Australian multimedia artist Ben Frost,
emphasizes the fact that commodification has played a crucial role in the global
spread of “Frankenstein.” Frost superimposes an iconic black-and-white image of
Karloff’s creature, including the neck-bolts, onto another icon of global commodity
culture: a flattened McDonald’s french-fry container (Fig. 20.2). Dominated by the
container’s red color and by the black of the creature’s picture, the image superim-
poses the instantly recognizable yellow arches associated with the McDonald’s brand
onto the right eye and nose of the creature. Frost not only suggests an association
between Hollywood cinema and the US fast-food industry, but also evokes a history
20 What Does It Mean to Be a “Global” Text? … 309
Fig. 20.3 The Munsters. Photo source The Everett Collection
of Halloween costumes, toys, cartoons, and other pop-culture paraphernalia that have
been associated with the signifier “Frankenstein.”
Let me confess right now that it was precisely through this kind of commodified
pop culture that I first encountered “Frankenstein.” I didn’t actually read Shelley’s
Frankenstein until I was in college and that encounter was no doubt shaped by the
fact that when I was in secondary school, I was a devoted fan of The Munsters
(1964–1966), a sitcom that ran for two seasons and 70 episodes, a gentle satire of
1960s suburbia, in which a family of Hollywood monsters believes themselves to
be perfectly “normal” Americans (Fig. 20.3). A running gag was that their niece
Marilyn—a conventionally pretty blonde played first by Beverley Owen and then by
Marilyn Priest—is the “plain” member of the family. The show was canceled when
its ratings dropped due to the appearance of the campy Batman series (another of my
childhood favorites), which was in color. The Munsters, however, became popular
in syndication (which is where I found it) and spawned several spinoff made-for-TV
movies. I was also pretty keen on a stop-motion-animated movie called Mad Monster
Party (1967), a musical comedy made by Bass and Rankin of Rudolph the Red Nosed
Reindeer fame. Mad Monster Party featured all of the famous Universal monsters,
and even had Boris Karloff providing the voice of Victor’s descendant Baron Boris
von Frankenstein, who is the head of the “Worldwide Organization of Monsters” and
is a bit of James Bond-style supervillain. I also used to watch Abbott and Costello
in syndication, so at some point along the line I ran into their 1948 film, Abbott and
Costello Meet Frankenstein, which was popular enough to be remade in 1954 in an
Arabic version called Haram Aleik, which means “shame on You.” The film was
popularly known as Ismail Yaseen meets Frankenstein, after the legendary Egyptian
comic who starred in the Lou Costello role (Fig. 20.4), and in 1962, it was remade
310 C. R. K. Patell
Fig. 20.4 Still from Ismail Yassin Meets Frankenstein (Haram aleik, 1953): Ismail is chased by
the Monster
as a Spanish language film Frankenstein el vampiro y compañía starring the TV

comedian Manuel “Loco” Valdes. And I treasured my copy of Norman Bridwell’s
How to Care for Your Monster (1970) from Scholastic Book Services, the cover of
which featured a young boy carrying nuts, bolts and a wrench down his basement
stairs, below which cowers a fearful Frankenstein’s Creature (Fig. 20.5). In short, I
started with the descendants of Shelley’s gothic masterpiece and traced my way back
to the original.
“Frankenstein” thus represents an ideal case study in the creation and spread of
what I am calling “global cultural heritage,” and Shelley’s 1818 novel represents
what I call “global text,” a monument of culture and a focal point for shared cultural
heritages, past, present, and future. Thinking about how a text like Shelley’s novel
has become “global” has led me to pose three different sets of questions: (1) In what
ways was a text like Frankenstein “global” in its own day, adopting a “worldly”
approach that transcends its particular locale? (2) How does the history of the publi-
cation, criticism, and (where applicable) the performance of the text transform it
into a global cultural commodity? (3) What is the cultural legacy of the text today
throughout a variety of global media forms, including plays, films, novels, operas,
and works of visual art? This framework synthesizes and extends a variety of different
methodologies within literary scholarship, including close reading, influence study
and intertextuality, reader-response theory, literary historiography, history-of-the-
book analysis, translation studies, materialist approaches, cultural studies, and world
literature theory.
Fig. 20.5 Cover of Norman

Bridwell’s How to Care for
Your Monster (Scholastic
Book Services, 1970)
Underlying my use of these approaches to shed light on Frankenstein and its lega-
cies is what I refer to as a “cosmopolitan” approach to reading. Cosmopolitanism,
a perspective in which difference is not a problem to be solved but rather an oppor-
tunity to be embraced, can help readers of Frankenstein and its heirs to make sense
of the tradition’s engagement with the opportunities and challenges posed by glob-
alization. In Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination (2015), I argue that a
cosmopolitan reading practice explores the interplay of sameness and difference, the
universal and the particular, the global and the local. Originating in the idea of the
world citizen and conceived in contradistinction to nationalism, cosmopolitanism has
more recently been described as an alternative to universalism, and also to pluralism
and multiculturalism. Cosmopolitanism draws on all three of these, but takes issue
with them and tries to mediate amongst their sometimes-competing claims. In other
words, cosmopolitanism mediates between the claims of sameness (drawing on the
idea of universalism) and the claims of difference (drawing on pluralism and its
offshoot multiculturalism). Cosmopolitans have been described as those who are
at home everywhere (because their identities are not rooted in particular nations,
regions, or similar group affiliations) and also at home nowhere (because they are
rootless).
312 C. R. K. Patell
In my view, cosmopolitanism is about the interplay of both of these kinds of

experiences—of being at home and not at home, of feeling comfort and discomfort—
and a truly cosmopolitan perspective actively cultivates whichever experience does
not immediately arise when it encounters something new. A cosmopolitan who finds
herself at home in a given situation will look for ways to make it different and strange;
she will likewise search for the familiar within situations that present themselves at
first as different and strange, as Other. Conceived in this way, cosmopolitanism is a
perspective that animates all “great” literature, which asks its readers to experience
otherness by channeling someone else’s words and thoughts. If, as I am arguing,
writers or filmmakers create out of something that might be called a cosmopolitan
impulse, then it may be part of the aesthetic and philosophical work of their texts to
encourage readers to engage in a concomitantly cosmopolitan reading practice.
The cosmopolitan reader recognizes that reading is a social practice. Whenever
readers encounter a piece of imaginative work, they are encountering words, images,
and ideas that are not theirs. It is the closest thing, given the self-enclosed nature
of human minds, to letting one consciousness merge with another. Meaning-making
emerges as a collaborative process: meaning is the result of a conversation between
the author and the reader through the mediation of the text. A cosmopolitan reading
practice requires readers to attune themselves constantly to the interplay of same-
ness and difference, of comfort and discomfort in the acts of writing, reading, and
performing texts. At the end of Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination, I
offer this advice to readers who wish to pursue a cosmopolitan reading practice:
“when you find a text familiar and comforting, look for ways to make it feel strange,
unfamiliar, and different; produce discomfort in yourself. And when a text makes you
uncomfortable, try to locate aspects of sameness and to make yourself comfortable
with its difference. Be at home with all the texts you encounter—and with none of
them” (159). My work at NYU Abu Dhabi with students and colleagues from every
corner of the world—not to mention the global rise of fundamentalism, nativism,
and authoritarian populisms in recent years—made it clear to me that when it comes
to practice, cosmopolitanism is not an idea whose time is past, but rather an idea
whose time has yet to fully come.
As I suggested earlier, in my conceptual framework, the term “global text” delin-
eates a single text (or writer’s oeuvre) that has become a monument of culture and
a focal point for shared cultural heritages, past, present, and future. Although I
also focus on so-called monuments of literature, my conception differs from Franco
Moretti’s description of the “world text” (“opere mondo”) as a “modern epic” that
depends on “scholastic institutions.” Moby-Dick and Ulysses are paradigmatic world
texts, because they cross generic boundaries and are marked by an encyclopedic
sensibility. For Moretti, the world text is often formally vexed as it embodies “a
discrepancy between the totalizing will of epic and the subdivided reality of the
modern world” (5), and it represents a relatively new phenomenon within literary
cultures. In my view, however, a text doesn’t have to be “modern” to be a “global
text”: Joyce’s Ulysses certainly qualifies as a global text, but even more so its prede-
cessor The Odyssey. Indeed, it is precisely through his invocation of Homer’s epic
that Joyce signals his aspiration to create a global text (Patell, 2015, 145).
Moretti’s conception of the world text as a modern epic emphasizes composition

and authorial intention in understanding the worldliness of a text. David Damrosch’s
conception of world literature, on the other hand, emphasizes circulation and recep-
tion (Patell, 2015, 145). In What Is World Literature? (2003), Damrosch argues that
world literature “encompass[es] all literary works that circulate beyond their culture
of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (4). Even with that restric-
tion in place, world literature might seem to be a category that is too capacious to be
useful. Damrosch remedies this problem by arguing that we should understand world
literature not as “an infinite, ungraspable canon of works,” but rather as “a mode of
circulation and of reading,” a conception that emphasizes the importance of transla-
tion (2003, 5). In the second edition of How to Read World Literature, he expands his
conception of the field, granting that “we can think of world literature either in terms
of a work’s production or in terms of its circulation” (2018, 4). Damrosch opens the
door for writers who adopt what we might call a worldly approach, who actively
seek to engage the world in the writings, often by engaging in dialogues with writers
from outside their own cultures of origin:
Whereas many authors have written primarily within a national or regional setting and have
become world authors only years or centuries later, others create their works in a much
wider context. Even if such writers aren’t translated, or even read abroad, they are already
actively participating in world literature, and our understanding of their works benefits from
our knowledge of the writers with whom they are in dialogue. (2018, 4)
Damrosch’s emphasis, nevertheless, remains on the idea of circulation, because

he is committed to the idea that “works of world literature have an exceptional ability
to transcend the boundaries of the cultures that produced them” (2018, 2). In short,
Damrosch seems more interested in what a text might be said to gain in translation
as it circulates outside of its original cultural context as what it we traditionally
understand it to lose in translation.
My global text framework splits the difference between the approaches proposed
by Moretti and Damrosch. Like Moretti, I am interested in what authorial inten-
tion, formal experimentation, and embeddedness in institutions of literary culture
contribute to the creation of “monuments” of global culture. Like Damrosch, I am
also interested in the contributions made by processes of circulation, translation, and
reception. My adoption of the term “monument” indicates that I am focusing on a
more restricted subset of works than Damrosch is, and I am less concerned by what
Damrosch might deem “misreading.” He notes that “the variability of a work of
world literature is one of its constitutive features—one of its greatest strengths when
the work is well presented and read well, and its greatest vulnerability when it is
mishandled or misappropriated by its newfound foreign friends” (2003, 5). I regard
mishandling and misappropriation as inevitable parts of the process that accompa-
nies the textual monumentalization that interests me. I prefer to think of what Harold
Bloom famously called “misprision” or “strong misreading” as instead “appropri-
ation” and “adaptation,” and I believe that they are crucial parts of the conceptual
framework I am proposing.
I began to conceive of this framework in 2008, while trying to think through the
idea of “Global Shakespeare” both as a curricular and a research initiative at NYU
314 C. R. K. Patell
Abu Dhabi. Although “Global Shakespeare” was becoming an increasingly important

field within Shakespeare studies in the academy, it was, at the moment, drastically
under-theorized and often conceived merely in terms of postcolonial responses to
Shakespeare’s work, which was taken to be an exemplar of the “Western” tradition.
In other words, most of the work in “Global Shakespeare” focused on the third set
of questions within my global text framework.
Although it is tempting to think about these sets of questions as “stages”—the
first set focused on the creation of a global text, the second on its dissemination, and
the third on its legacies in new work or new interpretations of old work—I believe
that thinking of the global text framework in terms of stages is most useful as a
heuristic, with research from each “stage” designed both to inform and be informed
by the other two. Knowing that we will be asking the questions of sets two and three
transforms our approach to the first set of questions (investigating the global nature
of the text in its own day), leading us to approach the text with a set of overlapping
interpretive frames. A preliminary list might look like this:
● mode of composition, whether oral or written and—if written—its relation to
orature;
● language of composition and whether the text under consideration is a translation
● historical context, including time period of composition
● biographical information about author
● intellectual context, including religious and philosophical contexts;
● literary historical context, including influence and intertextuality.
● generic context
● formal qualities (including such things prosody, figurative language, rhetoric, and
narrative structure)
● thematic interests
Together these frames promote an understanding of the interrelation of text and
context, with context understood to mean a set of overlapping literary, intellectual,
historical, geographic, and linguistic milieus. They provide readers with the tools to
take full advantage of the opportunity for the meaningful cosmopolitan conversations
that the literary text makes possible. Using these frames to trace the life-history of a
text, particularly those texts like Frankenstein that I have defined as “global,” offers
a way of understanding how literary texts enable cosmopolitan conversations to take
place over time and how these conversations are shaped by—and in turn help to
shape—cultural contexts (see Patell, 2015, 148).
Studying the circulation of Hamlet through time and space enables us to generate
a set of questions that we might pose—with adaptations—when studying texts from
genres other than drama and from periods other than Shakespeare’s. How do we need
to adapt these questions to novels and—more specifically—to Frankenstein and its
descendants? A novel, after all, is not constantly presented and re-presented in the
way that a famous play is, nor is it adapted with the kind of frequency that we see
directed toward Shakespeare’s work and Hamlet in particular. Applying the global
text framework to novels like Moby-Dick or Ulysses requires us to spend much more
time thinking about what I have identified as the first set of questions, which focuses
on the ways in which the text aspires to be global in the moment of its composition.
Both Melville and Joyce seemed to have had intentions that we might now consider
to be “global.”
Mary Shelley’s approach was much more like Shakespeare’s, and her novel
has ended up being adapted and recreated to an extent that neither Melville’s nor
Joyce’s novels can match. Certainly, Shelley sought to present her novel as some-
thing more than just a Gothic novel like the Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764).
Her subtitle—“The Modern Prometheus”—invokes a Greek myth about defiance
of the gods and the creation of human civilization that fascinated Romantic poets
like her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. Joining the Christian tradition to the Clas-
sical, Shelley used an epigraph from Milton’s Paradise Lost to emphasize the gravity
of her thematic intent. But she also draws on very contemporary scientific debates
about the validity of the idea of vitalism, the idea that life requires the presence of
some kind of energy or “vital spark” not present in in organic matter. In a sense,
the classical and Christian traditions were her “global,” the scientific debates her
“local.” Shelley’s novel, as Elizabeth Kostova reminds us in the introduction to a
recent Penguin edition, “was an overnight success and has never been out of print”
(x). Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Frankenstein (or, more precisely, his Creature) has
become a global icon.
In tracing the life-history of this icon, what I have described as “the local” in this
context—the novel’s engagement with science—has played a large part in Franken-
stein’s going “global.” Frankenstein was one of the key sources of the play in which
the term “robot” was coined: Czech writer Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal
Robots. One implication of the invocation of the Prometheus myth by Shelley’s novel
is the recognition that the myth is about technological progress, the transmission of
fire technology from the gods to human beings. Shelley understood the connection
between the Prometheus myth and her era’s increasing faith in scientific and tech-
nological progress; her modern Prometheus is deluded by his mastery of technology
into thinking he is a god (Patell, 2015, 98).
Although Čapek’s play R.U.R. reminds us that Shelley’s novel is a story about
scientific advances and the creation of new technology, readers might be forgiven
for not thinking about this idea because the novel itself de-emphasizes it. Victor
Frankenstein refuses to divulge the process by which he brings his creature to life
lest hearers who miss the point of history might be tempted to replicate his proce-
dures. And the creature is presented as a human being rather than a machine. The
first Hollywood film versions, James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of
Frankenstein (1935), change the logic of Shelley’s novel by taking us into Franken-
stein’s lab. Here is how Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein describes the process by which
he has infused life into the dead body parts that he has assembled into a whole in the
fourth chapter of the novel:
It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an
anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I
might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in
316 C. R. K. Patell
Fig. 20.6 Still from James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) starring Colin Clive as Victor
the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt
out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the
creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. (35)
Frankenstein deliberately leaves out the details of his process, referring only “to
the instruments of life” whatever they might be. After he has heard Frankenstein’s
story, the novel’s narrator, Walton, tries to pry the scientist’s methods from him:
Sometimes, I endeavored to gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature’s
formation, but on this point he was impenetrable.
Are you mad, my friend?” said he. “Or whither does your senseless curiosity lead you?
Would you also create for yourself and the world a demoniacal enemy? Peace, peace! Learn
my miseries and do not seek to increase your own. (151)
When Frankenstein speaks about “infus[ing] a spark of being into the lifeless
thing that lay at [his] feet,” he is speaking metaphorically. James Whale’s 1931 film
adaptation takes that metaphor and makes it literal, as it emphasizes the process
of creation, which turns out to involve lots of machines and the use of electricity
generated by lightning (see Fig. 20.6). Whale’s imagery taps into a technophobia
that animates Capek’s play R.U.R. and has become popular in Hollywood science
fiction and adventure films during the course of the twentieth century.
In R.U.R., the company director’s dream is a world in which robots have freed
humankind from the necessity to labor, essentially undoing the curse of original sin:
“There’ll be no more poverty,” he says, “Yes, people will be out of work, but by then
there will be no work left to be done. Everything will be done by living machines.
People will do only what they enjoy. They will live only to perfect themselves”
(21). The various versions of Frankenstein suggest a less idealistic attitude: near the
beginning of The Bride of Frankenstein, Colin Clive as Frankenstein laments the
failure of his experiment: “I did it. I created a man. And who knows in time I could
have trained him to do my will. I could have bred a race.” This Frankenstein does not
seem interested in engendering another free and equal being; he seems, instead, bent
on the creation of a race of robots that will do his bidding. The Frankenstein films
further suggest the robotic nature of the monster in a way that Shelley did not by
implanting bolts into the side of the monster’s neck—pieces of machinery that have
now become a permanent part of Frankenstein’s pop iconography (Patell, 2015, 99).
Arguably those two bolts are the most monstrous thing about the creature as played
by Boris Karloff, whose portrayal is still the most iconic image associated with the
idea of “Frankenstein” in global pop culture—as the artworks presented at the Kult
Gallery in Singapore attest. Those two metal bolts in the side of his neck signify a link
to the idea of the robot, but they also connect the creature to a figure that looms large
in pop cultural depictions of the fear of technology: the cyborg. The link between
Shelley’s Frankenstein and contemporary fears about artificial intelligence animates
two novelistic takes on the Frankenstein story published in 2019, Ian McEwan’s
Machines Like Me and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein.
Global texts bring new work into being, sometimes by inspiring later writers,
sometimes by antagonizing them, and very often through a mixture of both inspiration
and antagonism. In Machines Like Me, McEwan presents an alternative history of
twentieth-century Britain in which Alan Turing, generally considered to be the father
of the fields of modern computer science and artificial intelligence, did not commit
suicide but is instead alive and well and active in the 1980s when the novel is set.
In McEwan’s 1980s, Turing is able to live openly with his lover (who happens to be
a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist). He is still working on computers and
makes his breakthroughs publicly available to promote the greater good rather than
realize private gain. McEwan has called Machines Like Me an “anti-Frankenstein
novel,” arguing that “this idea that our technologies will rise up and consume us is
only partially true” (Lewis, n.p.). The pun in the novel’s title suggests not only that
machine might be benevolent—machines like (are fond of) me—but also that we
may ourselves be machines or enough like machines that the difference becomes
moot: machines like me. An interviewer for The Guardian described McEwan as “is
coming at the AI question from the opposite angle to Mary Shelley in Frankenstein”
(Adams, n.p.). According to McEwan, in Shelley’s novel, “the monster is a metaphor
for science out of control, but it is ourselves out of control that I am interested in”
(Adams, n.p.). Readers of Shelley’s novel, however, know that the idea of the self-
out-of-control—particularly the male self—is one of the ideas that the author is
dramatizing.
The idea that human beings are too often out-of-control also emerges as an impor-
tant idea in Winterson’s Frankissstein, which takes as its starting point the politics of
gender, both in Shelley’s day and in our own. Reviewing the book for The Guardian,
Johanna Thomas-Corr described Frankissstein as a “playful reanimation of Mary
Shelley’s 1818 classic,” which, she says, “gamely links arms with the zeitgeist. It’s
a book about artificial intelligence and gender fluidity that also harks back to themes
318 C. R. K. Patell
Winterson has been writing about for the past 30 years: love and desire, transfor-
mation and the unwritten meanings of the body” (Thomas-Corr, n.p.). Half of the
story is told through a limited third-person imagining of Mary Shelley’s life in and
around the writing of Frankenstein. The other half, set in the present, is told by
a trans narrator named Ry, who began life as “Mary” but now embraces “double-
ness,” after having their “top” done but not their bottom. Ry says, “I am liminal,
cusping, in between, emerging, undecided, transitional, experimental, a start-up (or
is it up-start?) in my own life” (29). Ry has testosterone injections have left them
with an elongated clitoris (two inches), that allows them to have intense sex with a
scientist named Victor, who is conducting advanced robotics and AI research and
is fascinated by Ry’s trans identity and body. Victor is trying to re-create the brain
of “Jack” Good, the British mathematician who worked with Alan Turing and the
code-breakers at Bletchley Park. The plot also involves an entrepreneur named Ron
(think “Byron” without the “By”), who has become rich by producing sexbots, and
Polidori is transformed into an ambitious and unscrupulous journalist named Polly
D.
Frankissstein rethinks the gender dynamics at work in Shelley’s novel, while also
echoing the elements of technophobia present in Čapek’s R.U.R. and Whale’s films. A
seemingly utopian thinker, Victor believes that the ultimate result of the AI revolution
will be the deconstruction of binaries like male and female, black and white, rich
and poor. “There will not,” he says, “be a division between head and heart, between
what I feel and what I think” (79–80). Commenting on the gender politics that she
explores in the novel, Winterson told an interviewer:
Transgender is interesting because gender is so annoying and so boring and has caused so
much trouble. … I don’t really think of myself as female or male, I just think of myself as
me. I’m not even sure I see myself as human. I don’t feel particularly human. My closest
friends will say to you: “Yeah, maybe, she’s more like some sort of creature. Not an animal,
but a creature thing.” I don’t always get the human. (Allardice, n.p.)
For the novel’s Victor, the trans person represents an aspect of the posthuman
future that his research is designed to bring into being. Victor says to Ry: “Weren’t
we just saying that in the future we will be able to choose our bodies? And to change
them? Think of yourself as future-early” (119). The novel links this conception
of body fluidity to the idea of artificial intelligence through its depiction of Ron’s
sexbots, who gain the kind of self-awareness that McEwan depicts in Machines Like
Me. Late in Frankissstein, Ron argues that “a lot of people will be glad not to have
any more crap relationships with crap humans. And how do you know it will be
one-way? Bots will learn. That’s what machine learning means” (312). Winterson
immediately follows this comment up with a poignant anecdote about a “man who
loves and is loved in return by an XX-BOT called Eliza” (312). After the man grows
old and dies, his family, finding her vaguely embarrassing, sell her on eBay, but “they
forget to wipe her clean.” She ends up with a new owner who has no interest in the
capabilities she has developed:
Her new owner isn’t interested in any of that. He’s a fuck-only type. She understands. She
wishes she could wipe her own software. I AM SORRY, she says, but she has no tears because
big bots don’t cry. (314)
Commenting on the dangers of artificial intelligence that are so often depicted in

pop culture and in the Frankenstein tradition, Winterson argues that “AI is dangerous,
but it’s dangerous in that every new invention is dangerous, in the sense that human
beings are dastardly and clever but we never know how to use anything” (Greenhalgh,
n.p.). The novel, however, is ultimately less worried about the dangers posed by bots
than it is about the dangers posed by humans, so many of whom turn out to be “crap.”
In Frankissstein, Winterson has found both a feminist perspective and a meditation
on the dangers of scientific rationalism that can serve as a springboard for thinking
about the challenges of the twenty-first century.
Iraqi novelist Ahmed Saadawi is comparatively uninterested in the politics of
gender and the politics of technology that animate McEwan’s and Winterson’s novels;
instead, his novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, published in Arabic in 2013 and trans-
lated into English by Jonathan Wright in 2018, finds in the Frankenstein tradition
resources for thinking about Middle East geopolitics in the aftermath of the US wars
in Iraq. Technology is replaced in Saadawi’s novel by magic, as he depicts a world in
which government security forces employ “analysts in parapsychology, astrologers,
people who specialize in communication with spirits and with the djinn, and sooth-
sayers” (76). Saadawi thus merges the global Frankenstein tradition with stories from
local Iraqi cultures.
It is a sign of the unpredictable ways in which ideas from global texts circu-
late that Frankenstein in Baghdad was not directly inspired by Shelley’s novel, but
rather by a film—and not James Whale’s films and not Haram Aleik, but rather
Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 adaptation, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Within the novel,
“Frankenstein in Baghdad” is the sensationalist title given to an article written for
a magazine called Al Haqiqia (The Truth) by one of the novel’s protagonists, the
journalist Mahmoud Al Sawadi:
Two days later Mahmoud gave [his editor] Saidi an article headlined “Urban Legends from the
Streets of Iraq.” Saidi liked it immediately. When Mahmoud did the layout for the magazine,
he illustrated the article with a large photo of Robert De Niro from the film of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. Mahmoud wasn’t happy when he got a copy of the issue, especially when he
saw that his headline had been changed.
“Frankenstein in Baghdad,” Saidi shouted, a big smile on his face. Mahmoud had been trying
to be truthful and objective, but Saidi was all about hype. (139)
Mahmoud probably shouldn’t have been surprised. The invocation of De Niro

in this passage is actually the second time we hear about his portrayal of Shelley’s
creature (see Fig. 20.7). Before we realize that Mahmoud will be a major character
in the novel, we meet him through the eyes of a German journalist who is doing a
story about Iraqi journalists and has accompanied him and her translator to her a
fantastic story by a junk dealer named Hadi, who claimed to have stitched together
a body from dead parts:
“That guy’s recounting the plot of a movie,” she said to Mahmoud as he walked her out of
the coffee shop. “He’s stolen his story from a Robert De Niro film.”
“Yes, it looks like he watches lots of movies. He’s well known in the area.”
“Then he should have gone to Hollywood,” she said with a laugh as she got into the translator’s
car. (19)
320 C. R. K. Patell
Fig. 20.7 Robert De Niro as

the Creature in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein,
Kenneth Branagh’s 1994
adaptation
The “Frankenstein” that occurs to these characters isn’t Shelley’s novel or even
the 1931 Hollywood adaptation by James Whale that made the Creature an icon
of horror films and Halloween nights in the United States. Instead, they think of
Branagh’s 1994 film, which purported to be more faithful to Shelley’s novel than
Whale’s version, but took its fair share of liberties. What Branagh’s film did do, in
addition to evoking the novelist’s name in its title, was restored to the Creature the
intelligence and ability to articulate complex thoughts that we find in the novel.
In fact, however, Branagh’s 1994 film seems to have made a big impression on
Ahmed Saadawi. In a piece that appeared in LitHub after the 2018 publication of the
English translation of Frankenstein in Baghdad, Zahra Hankir reports that Saadawi
“took a particular interest in fantasy novels as he came of age, and was a massive
fan of the 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, starring Robert De Niro, which
he watched a bootlegged copy of.” Then came an experience in a Baghdad morgue
in 2006, when Saadawi was a correspondent for BBC’s Arabic service: “I saw many
dead bodies. Not just dead bodies—body parts. Many body parts” (Hankir, n.p.). And
then he heard a morgue attendant tell a grieving young man who was trying to find
only a part of body of his brother who had been blown up by a bomb: “take what you
want, and make yourself a body.” That is what Hadi the junk dealer does in Saadawi’s
novel: he has put together a body—composed of parts from many different bodies—
so that it could be buried with respect. “I made it complete,” Hadi tells Mahmoud,
“so it wouldn’t be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people
and given a proper burial” (27). And then the unimaginable happens.
In the Literary Hub piece, Hankir observed, “Rarely do Arabic novels written
by Arab novelists who live in the Arab world break into the Western mainstream
the way Saadawi’s has.” She stresses the novel’s commitment to the local: “Though
dramatized with fantastic elements, Saadawi’s novel has given global readers insight
into the quotidian struggles of Iraqis, as experienced and witnessed by a local” (n.p.).
That commitment to the local was shared by translator Jonathan Wright, who drew on
not only his experience as a foreign correspondent in Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt,
and the Sudan, but also on Google Maps, as he sought to make his portrayal of the
Bataween neighborhood of Baghdad, where most of the novel is set, as authentic as
possible.
Saadawi’s novel is a darkly comic, thoroughly gripping account of the surreal

reality of life in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, but its success in the “Western
mainstream” no doubt has much to do with its invocation of “Frankenstein.” To be
sure, once he had identified his subject, Saadawi engaged seriously with Shelley’s
novel. The first of his novel’s three epigraphs comes from the creature’s address to
his maker in Shelley’s novel, and a reader of Frankenstein will see in Frankenstein in
Baghdad a reworking of many of Shelley’s techniques and motifs: multiple narrative
voices, an articulate creature, religious imagery, and a version of the moment when
Walton, the narrator of Shelley’s novel, finds himself face-to-face with the creature
in “real life.” In Saadawi’s novel, the creature—known as “Whatsitsname”—records
his story for posterity and explains that one of his followers regards him “as the
first true Iraqi citizen,” because he is “made up of body parts of people from diverse
backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes” and thus “represent[s] the
impossible mix that never was achieved in the past” (146–47). And if Whatsitsname
is a figure for the current Iraqi body politic, locked into what seems like an endless
cycle of violence and civil unrest, then perhaps the Victor Frankenstein who made
him is the United States that tore Iraq apart and then tried to put it back together
again.
Frankenstein in Baghdad thus draws on Shelley’s novel and the Frankenstein
traditions it spawned in order to pursue a cosmopolitan novelistic project in which it
portrays “local” Iraqi experience with local, regional, and global audiences ultimately
in mind. It is just the latest example of the way in which Shelley’s Frankenstein has
become what I call “a global text.”
References
Allardice, L. (2019). Jeannette Winterson: “I did worry about looking at sexbots” (interview.) The
Guardian, May 18.
Čapek, K. (2004). R.U.R. (Rossum’s universal robots). Trans. Claudia Novack. New York: Penguin
Books.
Damrosch, D. (2003). What is world literature? Princeton University Press.
Damrosch, D. (2917). How to read world literature. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley.
Greenhalgh, H. (2019). No rush to change gender—UK writer joins trans debate. Reuters, May 30.
Hankir, Z. (2018). Ahmed Saadawi wants to tell a new story about the war in Iraq. Literary Hub.
https://lithub.com/ahmed-saadawi-wants-to-tell-a-new-story-about-the-war-in-iraq. Accessed 12
October 2021.
Kostova, E. (2007). Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Penguin Deluxe Edition. New York: Penguin.
Lewis, H. (2019). Ian McEwan on his “anti-Frankenstein novel,” Machines Like Me. New Statesman,
April 17.
McEwan, I. (2019). Machines Like Me. New York: Anchor.
Moretti, F. (1996). The modern epic: the world-system from Goethe to García Márquez. New York:
Verso.
Nookmag. (2014). The Frankenstein freak show. Nookmag. https://www.nookmag.com/the-franke
nstein-freak-show/. Accessed 12 October 2021.
Patell, C. R. K. (2018). Cosmopolitanism and the literary imagination. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
322 C. R. K. Patell
Saadawi, A. (2018). Frankenstein in Baghdad. Trans. Jonathan Wright. New York: Penguin Books.
Shelley, M. (2012). Frankenstein: the 1818 text. Norton critical edition, 2nd edition. Edited by J.
Paul Hunter: New York: Norton.
Thomas-Corr, J. (2019). Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson review—an inventive reanimation.
The Guardian, May 20.
Wilkes, R. (2014). it’s alive! get your freak on at singapore’s celebration of mary shelley’s
monster. We Heart. https://www.we-heart.com/2014/08/21/the-frankenstein-freak-show-at-kult-
gallery-singapore/. Accessed 12 October 2021.
Winterson, J. (2019). Frankissstein. New York: Grove Press.
Index
A Borders, 78, 86–88, 90, 115, 121–123, 128,

Abu Dhabi, 17, 19, 22–25, 27–30, 312, 314 155, 188, 207, 214, 224, 228, 229,
Academia, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 41, 44–46, 231, 232
48–52, 54, 59, 62, 123, 168 Borrowing, 87, 125, 156
Achebe, Chinua, 12, 149, 153, 154, 170,
183–185, 187–192
African, 12, 22, 58, 78, 154, 169, 175, 184, C
185, 189 Canada, 17–19, 22–27, 30, 36, 70,
Anderson, Benedict, 221–227, 229–231, 257–261, 263, 269
233 Canon, The, 50, 52, 56, 59, 155, 172–178
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 150, 153 Capital, 21, 23, 56, 123, 149, 151, 152,
Appropriation, 313 235–241, 243, 244, 249, 250, 252,
Arabic, 18, 24, 26–28, 56, 58, 63, 86, 87, 253
89, 91–93, 95–102, 104–107, 109, Chaucer, 282, 285
110, 112, 113, 140, 172, 178, 179, Children’s literature, 235, 236, 238–243,
214, 236, 240, 242–246, 250, 252, 247, 249, 253
309, 319, 320 Choukri, Mohamed, 85–87, 89–93
Arabic English, 9 Colloquial, 198, 199, 242
Arnold, Matthew, 151 Colonization, 51, 54, 63, 152, 177, 244
Aspect, 42, 47, 86, 89, 95, 96, 101, 102, Colonizer, 177, 200, 271, 293, 294, 296,
104, 105, 107, 109, 112, 113, 121, 297, 299, 302, 303
122, 124, 125, 135, 136, 139, Communicative competence, 54, 56, 59
143–146, 199, 212, 213, 215, Community, 9, 13, 19, 46, 50, 56, 60–62,
221–223, 246, 258–260, 279, 299, 64, 67, 90, 127, 131–136, 138,
312, 318 141–143, 145–147, 153, 169,
Assessment, 11, 124, 125, 176, 277, 284 174–178, 180, 221–224, 226–233,
Autobiography, 195, 209, 257, 259, 262, 259, 261, 262, 266, 267, 270, 294
264, 266–268, 270, 271 Concentric Circles model, 20, 50
Confession, 209, 299
Contextual nativization, 62
B Corpus-based grammars, 95, 99
Barthes, Roland, 151 Cosmopolitan, 19, 153, 311, 312, 314, 321
Benign violation theory, 275, 284 Cosmopolitanism, 152, 311, 312
Bhabha, Homi, 197, 205, 258, 291–293, Creating tolerance, 153
296, 297, 301 Creative nonfiction (CNF), 208, 209,
Bidialectal writing, 61 211–213
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 323
to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4033-0
324 Index
Cultural capital, 175, 238, 243, 249, 250, Gender, 51, 138, 150, 152, 160, 162, 169,
252, 253 176, 180, 267, 280, 317–319
Cultural crossing, 229, 233 Global citizen(ship), 115, 123
Cultural dimensions of translation, 86 Global Englishes, 29, 35, 49, 50, 53, 55–58,
Cultural studies, 132, 135, 146, 154, 160, 64, 152, 154, 155
221, 310 Global human resources, 118
Global text, 167, 171, 174, 310, 312–314,
317, 319, 321
D Gothic, 184, 310, 315
Damrosch, David, 171, 173, 313 Gupta, 150, 155
Decolonization, 61, 152, 177, 281, 297
Deep culture, 121, 128
Diaspora, 69, 223 H
Didacticism, 247 Habitus, 235–239, 241–245, 247, 249, 252,
Dispersion, 73, 74 253
Double listening, 131, 139, 146 Hall, Stuart, 221–223, 225–227, 233
Hamid, Mohsin, 10, 221–233
Hayot, Eric, 152
E Higher education, 30, 44, 115, 117–121,
Education, 4, 5, 28, 38, 43, 44, 52–54, 56, 123–127, 151, 167–170, 175, 176
57, 59, 61, 64, 71, 96, 101, 113, Horizontal comradeship, 224, 230
115–128, 132, 144, 145, 149, 151, Humanism, 150, 153
152, 155, 157, 167–172, 177, 183, Humour, 275–285
235, 237, 239–241, 243, 246, 249, Hybridity, 195, 197, 199, 208, 209, 216,
251, 252, 257–261, 263–266, 291, 293, 295–301, 303
269–271
Emotional intelligence, 132, 134, 136, 137,
146 I
Empire, 281 Identity, 13, 20, 62, 68, 86, 88, 90, 93, 122,
English as a Foreign Language, 3, 5–7, 125, 126, 134, 145, 150, 151, 169,
9–11, 45, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 58, 174, 184, 195–197, 199, 201, 202,
61–64, 98, 99, 113, 115–128 204–206, 217, 221–227, 231–233,
English as a Lingua Franca, 29, 36–43, 45, 241, 257–260, 270, 271, 275, 291,
47, 50, 56, 60, 61, 118 292, 294–301, 303, 311, 318
English as an International Language, 6, 12, Imagined Communities, 221–227,
35, 37–42, 45, 47 229–231, 233
English as a Second Language, 5 Incongruity theory, 277, 278, 281–283
Eurocentrism, 152, 167 Independence, 241, 291, 295, 299, 302, 303
Exit West, 221–223, 225, 226, 228–233 Indigenous, 69, 177, 197, 257–268, 270,
271, 292, 293
Inner Circle varieties, 3, 4, 10, 11, 80
F Intercultural Communicative Competence
Fear, 9, 127, 137, 168, 222, 226–231, 233, (ICC), 55, 118, 124
293, 294, 301, 302, 317 Intercultural competence, 12, 13, 42, 115,
Folklore, 87, 186, 242 116, 119–128
Foreign language education, 115–118, 120, International English, 4, 19
123, 124, 127, 128 Internationalization, 45
Fragments, 188, 300 Islamization (of the text), 244, 247
Fundamentalism, 312
J
G Japan, 18, 22, 24, 36, 38, 40, 42, 45, 46,
Gatekeepers, 9, 49, 50, 52, 64, 175 115–128, 150, 153, 154
Index 325
L Nationalism, nationalist, 41, 152, 154, 179,

L1 Englishes, 5, 7, 10 241, 311
Lexical bundles, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73–76, Native speaker, 4, 7–11, 17–23, 25, 27–29,
78–80 38, 50, 53, 61, 64, 104, 199, 203, 205
Linguicism, 18, 19, 21, 22, 29 Native speaker fallacy, 17, 20, 22, 27, 30
Linguistic background, 19, 20, 22, 23, Native speakerism, 39
26–29, 36, 39, 50 Nativism, 153, 312
Linguistic imperialism, 52 Nativist, 153, 225, 229–231
Linguistic innovation, 52, 53, 55, 56, 60, New Varieties of English, 3, 4, 10, 12
63, 64 Nonfiction (NF), 207–212, 214–217
Literary canon, 12, 49, 172, 174–177, 200
Literary criticism, 67–69, 71–74, 78, 152,
162 O
Literature, 12, 13, 30, 52, 58, 64, 67–69, Oman, 9, 18, 19, 49, 51, 56–58, 131, 133,
72, 75, 77, 85, 87, 89, 90, 124, 133, 138, 142, 144, 145, 169–171, 177
135, 145, 146, 149–162, 167, Orality, 183, 185–187, 189, 191, 192
169–178, 180, 183–187, 195, 202, Other, The, 20, 24, 40, 41, 44, 45, 50, 69,
203, 208, 212, 222, 223, 235, 237, 90, 93, 117, 118, 124, 125, 138, 153,
239–241, 243, 258, 260, 271, 158, 179, 197, 200–203, 208–210,
275–278, 280–285, 300, 312 223–225, 228, 236, 238, 247, 253,
Love, 35, 45, 91, 92, 103, 138, 144, 157, 264, 266, 268, 275, 276, 280, 294,
174, 179, 188, 202, 205, 222, 225, 297, 298, 302–304, 313, 314, 318
230, 246, 247, 269, 293, 297, 298, Ownership, 8, 20, 21, 49, 53, 63, 64, 79
302, 303, 318
P
Pan-Arab, 243
M
Paratextual, 195, 201, 240, 243–245, 249,
Magical realism, 223, 231, 232
251, 253
Mahfouz, Naguib, 240
Pedagogical, 3, 6–9, 11, 12, 42, 71, 95–97,
Manipulating text, 88 104, 106, 132, 135, 149, 151, 155,
Margins, 85, 88 157, 167, 168, 247
Memory, 46, 98, 131, 133, 138–140, 145, Pedagogical grammars, 95–98, 100, 101,
204, 209, 221, 262, 269, 291–293, 104–106, 112, 113
297, 298 Pedagogy, 8, 12, 57, 101, 150, 151, 156,
Metafiction, 291, 294–300, 303, 304 157, 159, 160, 162, 168, 169, 171,
Metalinguistic strategies, 59 174–176, 180
Metamorphosis, 291, 295, 300, 301, 303 Pluricentricity of English, 3
Metaphor, 13, 156, 160, 177, 236, 285, 302, Podcast, 36–43, 45–47
316, 317 Postcolonial, 6, 13, 63, 69, 79, 150, 153,
Migrant, 93, 179, 221–227, 229–233 157, 189, 197, 203, 223, 258, 261,
Migration, 222, 223, 227, 230–233 271, 292, 293, 297, 299, 300, 303,
Mimicry, 293, 296 304, 314
Modality, 95, 96, 101, 139, 146, 176 Postcolonial discourse(s), 152, 271
Modern Standard Arabic, 244, 252 Postcolonial studies, 152, 197, 223, 257,
Monolingual bias, 101 258
Moretti, Franco, 167, 312, 313 Posthumanism, 318
Morphology, 12, 113, 243, 246 Post-structural linguistics, 95, 106
Process, 12, 18, 19, 22, 38, 41, 48, 50, 51,
56, 61, 63, 69, 78, 85, 86, 88, 91–93,
N 95, 96, 99, 102, 103, 107, 110, 113,
Narrative fiction, 209, 297 116, 117, 121, 132–134, 138, 139,
National identity, 115, 118, 119, 123, 125, 144, 146, 149, 151, 153, 155, 161,
126, 128, 152, 244, 303 168, 169, 177, 184, 197, 214, 223,
326 Index
261, 276, 277, 283–285, 294, 297, Translanguaging, 30, 45

300, 312, 313, 315, 316 Translation, 30, 45, 63, 69, 85–93, 95–97,
Progressive form, 95, 103, 110, 112 100, 102, 105–110, 112, 113,
Progressivist, 150, 152 117–119, 122, 127, 131, 133, 137,
140, 141, 146, 153, 156, 157, 167,
171, 174, 189, 191, 195, 196,
Q 199–201, 203–205, 235–253, 310,
Quran, 145, 248, 249 313, 314, 320
Translation errors, 96
Translators, 85–93, 95, 96, 101, 103, 104,
R 106, 113, 133, 136, 200, 201, 235,
Racism, 22, 152, 168, 174, 268 237–240, 243–245, 247, 248,
Recasting, 60 250–252, 319, 320
Reflexivity, 107, 155, 217, 297 Travel, 18, 20, 28, 35, 40, 46, 58, 69, 71, 87,
Relief theory, 278 120, 146, 172, 184, 209, 229, 235,
Rewriting text, 88 238, 239, 241–244, 247–250, 252,
Rule-based grammars, 98 253, 275–280, 282, 284, 285, 296
Travel writing, 277, 280, 281
S
Science, Technology, Engineering, U
Mathematics (STEM), 149, 151
United Arab Emirates, 17–19, 22–24, 26,
Self-identification, 299
30
Sexuality, 301, 303
Universalism, 149–158, 160–162, 311
Sociology, 221, 238, 276, 285
Source language, 85, 86, 112
Source text, 86–92, 95, 96, 98, 112, 200,
205, 244, 245, 248, 252 V
Standard Arabic, 89, 96 Value, 28, 40, 41, 52, 56, 87, 89, 90, 96,
Standard L1 Englishes, 8 98–105, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113,
Storytelling, 62, 131, 134, 136, 138, 146 116, 118, 121, 122, 124, 127, 133,
Student translators, 95, 96, 98, 101, 104, 134, 141, 142, 149–151, 153, 154,
105, 112 157, 159, 160, 162, 172, 174, 176,
Student writing, 62, 67, 74 179, 187, 197, 201, 222, 223, 236,
Surface culture, 121, 122, 127 240, 243, 248–250, 280, 282, 284
Sustainable development goals, 115, 123 Vancouver, 17–19, 22–30
T W
Target language, 62, 85, 90, 91, 101, 112 Whiteness, 8, 22, 26, 173
Target text, 86–88, 90, 92, 201, 205, White Other, The, 153
244–248 White supremacy, 168
Taxonomy, 69, 96, 97, 104, 160, 284 World Englishes, 3–13, 17, 29, 35–37, 39,
Teacher training, 125, 126 40, 42, 47, 49–59, 63, 64, 67–70, 75,
Things Fall Apart, 149, 153, 154, 157, 170, 78, 80
184–191 World Englishes-based pedagogy, 3
Traditional literature, 240 World literature, 64, 155, 156, 167, 173,
Transcultural act, 85 178, 310, 313

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World Englishes, Global Classrooms

Kirsten Hemmy · Chandrika Balasubramanian

World Englishes, Global

ISBN 978-981-19-4032-3 ISBN 978-981-19-4033-0 (eBook)

New Englishes, New Questions—New Answers

Barbarism, conquests, contracts, hook n’ crook Christian theologies, and missionary

Dr. DaMaris B. Hill, Ph.D.

Introduction: Envisioning the English Department

Muscat, Oman Kirsten Hemmy

Part I On Language and Culture

9 Creative Cultural History as a Medium for Social

Part II On Language and Culture

20 What Does It Mean to Be a “Global” Text?: The Example

Chandrika Balasubramanian’s book Register Variation in Indian English (2009)

AAP Association of American Publishers

SEL Social and Emotional Learning

Keywords World Englishes · EFL · Globalism · Classism · The classroom ·

Emergence and Development of World Englishes

The Role of WE Scholarship in Perpetuating the Continued

Standard L1 Englishes Versus World Englishes: The Role

In such a discussion of the pedagogical implications of WE research, it would be

Language Teachers and Professionals

Notions of Appropriateness in Academic Discourse

An important factor that contributes to WE scholarship remaining largely theoretical

World Englishes in Academia: Where Can We Go?

Matsuda (2018) explains that Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL),

such as these, he explained, decanonized traditional literary conventions and genres

outside the hallowed halls of academe. Perhaps, if English departments functioned

Keywords Native Speakerism · Diversity · English Language Teaching (ELT) ·

linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2015) and often racial discrimination toward teachers

Complexities Surrounding the Term “Native Speaker”

Definitions of the term “native speaker” are seemingly inexhaustible. According to

The Ownership Debate

Linguicism and the Racialization of English

Fig. 2.1 Job advertisements in 2020 requesting native speaker teachers

Lippi-Green (2012) argues that linguicism is rarely considered true discriminatory

(RQ1) How is a native speaker defined?

Context and Participants

Table 2.1 Student and teacher profiles

complete a questionnaire or participate in a focus group. In Vancouver, 30 teachers

Learnt English at school

Fig. 2.2 Vancouver-based participants’ definitions of a native speaker (number)

From participant quotes in Themes 1 and 2, the concept of a NS is fuzzy at best.

Inspiring example (T-Q: American, Abu Dhabi-based)

Similar to the experiences voiced in Theme 6, Zacharias (2019) speaks of transna-

Discussion: Toward Promotion of Diversity in English

Christopher G. Haswell and Jonathan Shachter

Keywords English as a Medium of Instruction · World Englishes · Podcast ·

English is a complex commodity of the modern world. Unlike other commodities,

C. G. Haswell (B) · J. Shachter

Dr. Aya Matsuda, Arizona State University

Paper discussed: Matsuda and Friedrich (2011). English as an international language:

Dr. Jennifer Jenkins, University of Southampton

Paper discussed: Jenkins (2009). English as a lingua franca: Interpretations and

contexts to recognize and adopt a pluricentric approach to language teaching and

Dr. Nobuyuki Hino, University of Osaka (Japan)—Interview

Dr. Ana Sofia Hofmeyr, University of Kansai

Paper discussed: Hofmeyr (2020). Development of Intercultural Competence as a